Oral Development Characteristics in Infants and Young Children and Texture Staging Strategies for Complementary Foods

Complementary foods serve as a crucial medium for early sensory experiences in infants and young children, and their textural properties are closely associated with the development of chewing and swallowing capacity, food acceptance, and long-term dietary habits of infants and young children. While a variety of complementary foods are currently available on the market, there is a lack of unified standard system for textural grading. This limitation restricts the scientific evaluation of different complementary food products in terms of textural suitability and swallowing safety, making it difficult to fully meet the specific textural requirements of infants and young children at different stages of growth and development. The International Dysphagia Diet Standardization Initiative (IDDSI) has developed a standardized eight-level textural grading framework, which incorporates parameters such as hardness, viscosity, and granularity, enabling standardized classification of food texture and offering a potential solution for the scientific staging of complementary foods. This article reviews the oral development and physiological characteristics of infants and young children at different ages, and summarizes the current status of research on complementary foods for infants and young children. Based on the IDDSI textural grading framework, this study aims to provide a scientific basis for improving the compatibility between textural design of complementary food products and oral development and also provides a reference for the future standardization of textural staging of complementary foods.