Children's nutrition lecture held

There is no "perfect nutritional formula" that can be applied to all children. Personalized adaptation is the core of children's feeding.

Less than 10 minutes into the opening, Aunt Zhang in the front row stood up and asked questions, holding a bag full of nutritional supplements. Calcium, iron, zinc, DHA, lactoferrin, and probiotics were placed on half the table. She said that her 7-year-old grandson was 5 centimeters shorter than his classmates and was fed 6 kinds of supplements every day. Last month, the child care still found mild zinc deficiency and vitamin D deficiency. Director Li of the Clinical Nutrition Department of the Municipal Children's Hospital who was present at the scene answered the question first. According to the general guidance in the field of public health, the first thing to check is whether the intake of macronutrients is sufficient. "Many parents always focus on supplements. In fact, their children do not eat enough 2 taels of staple food and 1 tael of lean meat every day. They cannot absorb trace elements no matter how much they are supplemented. This is also the current mainstream view in the academic community: supplements are always the icing on the cake, and daily diet is the foundation."

Teacher Chen, who has been promoting children's food education for 5 years, sitting next to her, also added another idea. She has come across many children whose daily diet is complete according to the standard but still lacks nutrients. In the end, it was found that they have hidden food intolerance. "For example, some children become allergic after drinking milk every day, and their intestinal mucosa is damaged and they cannot absorb anything they eat. At this time, according to the functional requirements, From a medical perspective, it is much more effective to avoid food intolerances and adjust the intestines first than to take supplements. In recent years, more and more children have suffered from this condition, and the academic community is also doing related large-scale statistics. There is no unified clinical guidance standard yet, and parents do not need to blindly follow the trend to check for intolerances. If there is a real developmental delay problem, then targeted investigation will be enough."

When we were preparing this time, we deliberately did not make the "universal children's recipe" PPT that was posted online, and left 40 minutes of one-on-one consultation time. A mother asked with a three-day food diary, saying that her child had eaten one pound of vegetables and 300ml of milk every day according to the "child nutrition standards" posted online, but still suffered from constipation every three days. Director Li flipped through two pages of the diary and discovered the problem: the food she gave her baby were chopped steamed pumpkins and stir-fried green vegetables, with almost no crude fiber foods with gluten. The dietary fiber structure was too simple, which of course made it difficult to promote intestinal peristalsis. Teacher Chen asked a few more questions about her eating status. , only to realize that the child always eats a bowl in 5 minutes and swallows it without chewing it thoroughly. "There are several children of the same type in the food education camp I take. They first practice chewing each mouthful of rice 20 times. Within half a month, the constipation is relieved. Sometimes the problem is not what to eat, but how to eat."

As a co-organizer of this event, when I contacted parents to sign up, I met several parents who followed "vegetarian food for children" and "ketogenic diet". This time, there was also a special discussion session on site. For this type of controversial feeding method, the experts present did not kill it with a stick, but reminded them that the metabolic system and developmental needs of minors are completely different from those of adults. Adopting extreme dietary patterns rashly can easily cause irreversible developmental damage. Even if you want to try it, you must first conduct a comprehensive nutritional assessment under the guidance of a professional nutritionist, and do not use your own children as guinea pigs.

Interestingly, in the middle of the lecture, a mother ran out to make a call with her cell phone in hand. Her voice was so loud that she could hear it through the glass, "Mom, please stop feeding your baby braised pork every meal! Experts just said that a high-fat diet will affect calcium absorption! Don't always say that fat means well-fed!" The whole audience laughed. In fact, this contradiction of intergenerational feeding is also the core reason why many parents spend time on weekends to listen to the lecture - it's not that they don't know how to feed, but that the whole family's feeding concepts need to be aligned first.

At the end of this lecture, we did not give everyone a printed "standard recipe". Instead, everyone received a blank food diary with reference intervals for nutritional intake for different age groups, as well as a public consultation channel from two teachers. To be honest, after holding so many science popularization activities, my deepest feeling is that there is never a standard answer to raising a baby. No matter how good other people’s baby-raising secrets are, it is not as good as spending three more days observing your own baby: what tastes good, whether the stool is normal, whether it is running or jumping energetically. These most intuitive details are more reliable than any nutritional standards posted online.