Nutrition for Children

Food has an enormous impact on children’s health, but it is only in the last five years that the debate about children’s diets has started hitting the headlines. We seem to have only just woken up to the fact that we seem to have got things very wrong. We have more overweight children than ever before. More very young kids showing signs of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, something we never used to see in children and this risk is being carried forward into adult life.

The fact that we are killing our kids has lead to whole TV series on family nutrition, but while it is easy to make entertainment out of pulling apart the worst of diets, the way of building up the ideas of good nutrition in daily practice are harder to achieve. The media do not give balanced information about nutrition, and the power of TV advertising, and the promotion of popular brands of poor nutritional worth in the supermarkets leads kids ever backwards towards the poor health choices of what they really want to eat. With the best of parent’s intentions the battle over what our children eat is not easy to win. At best there will be negotiations and compromise, but it is important where the final lines are drawn.  This is what being a good parent is all about.

Healthy eating for children is not always so easy. You have to make sure your child eats a healthy breakfast, has healthy snacks, cuts down on sugary drinks and junk food, avoids saturated and trans-fats and additives. Oh yes, and cut down on salt. A good book on children’s nutrition is a goldmine of ideas on how to actually put everything into practice.

Thanks to Jamie Oliver the appalling state of school dinners has been highly publicised in the media, and action is being taken to improve matters, but of course this needs to be reinforced back at home, and children should be encouraged to eat a wide variety of foods from an early age, remembering that children are very influenced by what their parents eat.

Children’s IQ, intelligence and behaviour are greatly influenced by diet. Not only are children's vitamins and minerals important, but the essential omega-3 fats (fish oils) have been shown to be particularly important in brain development. These are obtained in the diet from oily fish. These have been shown to be vital for maximising intelligence and good behaviour. They can even reverse low performance and disruptive and poor behaviour in some children whose nutritional needs are not being met.

Giving vitamins and supplements to all children is still an area where the is no general agreement. The ‘old school’ traditional medical approach is to say that they should get all the nutrients they need from a normal diet. The ‘new school’ nutritional approach to health points out that the nutritional content of food has declined so much in recent years, and that even the best diet nutritionally ‘ain’t what it used to be’. Taking a good balanced children's vitamin supplement , and a children's omega-3 supplement seems a sensible thing to do to protect your child’s health, especially for children who may not be getting all these nutrients in a balanced way from their diet, and it can improve their concentration and behaviour.

Children also need an hour’s exercise a day, but in an age of TV, computer games and the Internet can be difficult to fit in. This is the current recommendation by the Department of Health, but a recent study published in the Lancet suggests this may not even be enough to prevent the start of heart problems beginning, which continue into adult life.  The exercise should be of at least moderate intensity, so walking and cycling are OK.