Sanitizing and Disinfecting Baby Bottles

Welcome back to the Inspector Mama™️ Podcast. On this episode, I will discuss sanitizing and disinfecting baby bottles!

Be honest here...

Have you ever...

ONE - actually sanitized your baby’s bottles?

Or

TWO - know that this was an option?

Sanitizing and disinfecting the baby’s bottle, pacifiers, and all of that baby gear... It can be overwhelming!

Never fear, you know I have your back. If anything needs to be sanitized and disinfected, you know I’m all over it.

Ok, let’s start with the definitions. Also, keep in mind that I’m coming at this from a food safety side, REHS in the house y’all!

Sanitizing means “to reduce microorganisms of public health importance to levels considered safe.”

Disinfecting means “to destroy or irreversibly inactivate specified infectious fungi and bacteria, but not necessarily the spores, on hard surfaces.”

Beyond that, there’s hospital level sterilization. That’s heavy duty stuff and I won’t go into that on this episode.

I’m just going to add my two cents here too... when my little BG arrived, there wasn’t as much information available on the internet. Because I am who I am, I didn’t trust mommy blogs and the internet in general. I applied the knowledge I gained from my experience working with the FDA Food Code. As you know, I will only cite from sources that I trust. You can find all of that information in the show notes - because you might be a little neurotic like me. I’m also only discussing how to clean, sanitize, and disinfect baby bottles on this podcast episode. I will do a separate episode for breast pumps.

Okay - this is how you do this thing!

First, you must clean the baby bottles, nipples, pacifiers, and all of that stuff that your little one might mouth. You have to get a scrubby pad, those little bottle and nipple brushes, some soap, and some warm water. You have to scrub that stuff clean. If you don’t scrub the bottles and all of the parts clean, then you just have cleaner dirt.

Now that you have scrubbed all of that stuff off, visually inspect your items. Make sure that there isn’t a fermented piece of something stuck to any of those tiny pieces. If there are, you have to wash it again. I’m going to trust that you are as neurotic as I am about what goes around my baby, and I know you will do this part correctly.

Then, you can put them in your dishwasher. You may need to put the bottles on the top rack and you will need one of those baby bottle accessory cages. You need to get a baby lock for the dishwasher too. Once your baby starts crawling, reaching and pulling is right around the corner. You don’t want them to get hurt by messing with the dishwasher.

Check your settings, there is usually a hot water wash setting and sanitize setting. Select those settings. If you have a dishwasher with a sanitize setting, you don’t need to do anything else as far as sanitizing.

Here’s the tricky part... before those baby bottles and the pieces are taken out of the dishwasher, you have to wash your hands. Otherwise, you are putting germs right back on the bottles. A long time ago, when I was a maternal and child health educator, I was teaching a little one how to wash hands. We said that there was peanut butter on the handles of the handwash sink. If the little one touched the handles of the sink without a paper towel, there would be peanut butter all over their hands again! That has always stuck with me. Same thing applies to grown ups though.

If your dishwasher does not have a sanitize setting or if you washed the bottles by hand, you will need to do this next part:

Put a large pot of water on the stove and let it boil.

Remember your other safety stuff here - stove guard, eyes on baby, keep the baby away from the stove and boiling hot water.

Once that water starts boiling, place the bottles and accessories into the boiling water. Let the items boil for 5 minutes. When it’s done, use tongs to remove the bottles

There is a way to sanitize using bleach. However, I am on Team Less Chemicals, so I just used the boiling water method. If you do want to know how to use bleach, just send me a message by going to InspectorMama.com. There is a time and a place to use bleach, so I do think it has its place. For example, if there were a hurricane and we didn’t have power or a way of getting water to boil. Maybe I will do a podcast episode on how to use bleach to sanitize.

Make sure that the surfaces that your bottles are drying on, like the dish rack or the cupboard, make sure your surfaces are clean. If you store your clean bottles on a dirty dish rack, you now have dirty bottles.