Healthy food for a happy baby
By Anup Deb Nath

MANY of us feel that fitness and diet need to be regulated once we are well into our thirties or only if we have a medical problem. Contrary to popular ideas, children are just as much in need of the correct nutrition since they are in the midst of their growing period. Exercise also plays a very important part in the child’s growth, development and in the kind of health that he/she will inherit as they grow older.

Feeding children is a problem encountered by most mothers. There has seldom been a mother who has not had a complaint regarding her child’s eating habits. Mostly this complaint is: "he/she just doesn’t eat’’. Hearing the number of mothers echoing the same complaint could mislead an untrained person into imagining the worst kind of health problem.

A doctor once mentioned that children are not going to starve themselves. They will eat when they are hungry. It is the quantity of what they eat that doesn’t seem to satisfy most mothers. Very few of them actually think about what they are eating rather than how much. Quality here matters much more than quantity and it is important to remember to give your child food that is nutritious, balanced as well as tasty.

Snacks often tend to fill children up so that they refuse to eat when they are served a meal. Snacks are fine when they are the healthier option rather than the out-of-a-packet option that is exercised by most mothers. Try to use your imagination and create food that is healthy for the child but really fools the child into imagining that it is tasty rather than healthy food.

Most children in India are under-exercising. Television has been blamed for this by numerous people for years now. Actually it is also the fact that many of us do not really encourage, participate or then help our children in getting enough exercise into their day as we should.

Either parents say that they are too busy to drop the child to whatever activity that the child wants to go to, or it is a total lack of parental participation that makes the child head straight for the television. Come to think of it the television always seems to be there for the child while parents often turn around and say "not now, I’m busy’’ much too often to the children.

Keeping children healthy and fit has been an endeavour and there are some useful tidbits that can help you achieve this by understanding what is good and what’s not for your child.

A Swedish study kept track of more than 500 children who were obese till they grew to be adults or more than 40 years. Their findings were that most obese parents had children who also went on to be obese. Also those who were born with a birth weight of 9.9 pounds or more were also more likely to be obese later in life. Health problems such as chronic cardiovascular problems were more and appeared at an earlier age in obese children than in those who were thin as children. The conclusion they came to from this study was that early obesity often runs in the family and in order to keep their health the children should be put on weight reduction methods prescribed by a doctor to benefit early in life.

Creative dance is considered to be one of the best form of exercise for children. It provides them with the physical discipline and exercise they need as well as exposes them to a variety of music and rhythms. The creative movements in the dance form are also good for awkward or uncoordinated children. Many preschoolers in the West are taught dance which initially emphasises motor skills such as running, hopping, jumping and skipping which go on to help the children in many ways subsequently.

When children are born they have enough iron stored in their bodies to fulfil their bodies’ nutritional needs for the first six months. After that they need their diet to supplement iron into their bodies. Babies who were found deficient in iron after the age of six months were found to be a anaemic, and their development was also noticeably slower than those without any iron deficiencies. Talking, walking, coordination were some of the main areas where the children were seen to be slower than the others.

High fibre foods are very popular with adults as these foods are said to lower cholesterol as well as keep cancer at bay.According to The American Academy of Paediatrics Committee on Nutrition too much fibre is not good for your baby . One reason is that fibre will fill up the baby faster and therefore not let him get the calories needed for growth. Secondly, fibre tends to bind essential minerals like iron, calcium, zinc and magnesium and prevent them from getting absorbed by the body.

Children need snacks in between their meals, says Lisa McCuskey chief clinical dietician of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, U.S.A. Since children’s stomachs are considerably smaller than adults stomachs they need light snacks in between meals to get all the required nutrients. Try to ensure however that the snacks are the healthy variety rather than junk food.

It is not recommended to try to put your child onto a low-fat, low-sugar, low-calorie diet when he is still at a growing age. Overly restrictive diets can actually harm rather than help children. Young children need calories in proportion to their weight, so a child who weighs 40 pounds will need about 1,800 calories a day. (The child's mother at 135 pounds would need about 2,200 calories a day). A diet that is very low in fat might not provide enough calories needed by an active growing child.

Fat is a concentrated source of calories and actually contains more than double that in carbohydrates or protein. Try to provide the child with a variety of healthy food and let them choose what and how much of what you offer them to eat. Putting a young child on too severe a diet aimed at weight reduction can interfere with the normal growth and development of the child.

This feature was published on October 10, 1999