Healthful diets for kids: Why some seemingly natural diets can harm children

© 2010 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Anybody has heard about the perils of the loftier-fat, high starch, low-cobweb nutrition common throughout the affluent, industrialized world.

So shouldn't we steer our families toward a more "natural" diet? Eat the mode we were meant to consume. Eat like our hunter-gatherer ancestors and enjoy ameliorate wellness.

It's not a bad program.

If y'all consider the diets of modern-day hunter-gatherers, several things stand out.

• They eat a wide diverseness of fruit and vegetables.
• Their carbohydrates tend to have low glycemic indices.
• They swallow little sodium.
• They go plenty of vitamins and minerals.
• They swallow very trivial saturated fatty and go much more of the skillful fats—like omega-three fatty acids—than do almost Americans (Eaton et al. 1999).

Simply not every diet challenge to be "natural" is consistent with the enquiry. Some are based on misunderstandings. Others on quackery and pseudoscience.

And when these diets take extreme form–eliminating whole food groups from the diet or severely restricting loftier-energy foods–these food plans pose special wellness risks for kids.

Extreme diets put kids at special adventure considering they have special needs (Bogin 1997; Kostyak et al 2007). Consider these points:

• Compared to an adult, a immature child may spend iii times equally much of her resting metabolism feeding her encephalon.
• Her brain needs fat—especially omega-3 fatty acids—to grow.
• Her body needs fat, besides. And not just for energy: Some vitamins can't be absorbed without fat in the diet.
• For her body weight, a kid burns more than fat than an adult. (And yep, this has been demonstrated experimentally—run into Kostyak et al 2007).
• Her smaller body is less energy efficient, and her digestive tract can't extract as much energy from high-fiber, hard to assimilate foods.
• If she nevertheless has her "babe" teeth—which have shallow roots and aren't as stiff as permanent, adult teeth—she can't chew uptough, fibrous, or hard foods to the aforementioned degree that adults can.

So nosotros tin't wait kids to thrive on exactly the same diet that adults consume.

Kids–peculiarly immature children–need more energy and fatty for their torso weight than adults do. They can't handle equally much cobweb as adults tin. And this may explains whyyoung children are so picky virtually what they swallow. Humans have evolved an early childhood preference for soft, easy-to-swallow, high-energy foods.

How do we sort the skillful dietary recommendations from the bad?

Hither are some bones guidelines.

Very depression-fat diets aren't good for kids.

Some kids living in affluent countries swallow too much fat. Simply extremely restrictive fat intake isn't practiced either.

Enquiry suggests that kids should become at least 25-30% of their calories from fatty. When fat intake dips below this level, kids are more than likely to suffer from poor nutrition and lower growth rates (Bogin 1999; Butte 2000; Kostyak et al 2007).

And according to the American Dietetic Association, dietary fat should not exist restricted in babies nether 2 years old.

The bottom line? Low-fat diets designed for adults (to prevent heart affliction, obesity, and other ailments) arenot advisable for the average child.

Very high-fiber intake can inhibit a child's growth and cause malnutrition

Fiber is good for us, and studies propose thatvirtually people living in flush, industrialized countries don't get enough.

But people who live in impoverished agronomical societies ofttimes have the opposite problem. And kids are specially vulnerable.

Veryloftier-fiber diets tin can cause problems, particularly if these diets include lots ofphytic acrid, which is found in grains and legumes and inhibits the absorption of ironand other minerals.

When young children subsist on a diet that is very high in fiber and phytates, they may suffer from malnutrition. No thing how much they eat, they can't become plenty free energy—or absorb plenty vitamins and minerals—to meet their needs (Bogin 1999).

What constitutes a "very high-cobweb diet"? No health agency has established a firm limit. Just if you stick relatively close to the recommendations of the American Dietetic Association, your child's fiber intake will exist many times less than that of the malnourished kids mentioned in a higher place.

The American Dietetic Clan has proposed the "age plus 5" rule, which means that each twenty-four hours a child should eat v grams of fiber plus 1 gram of fiber for every yr old he is. After the age of xx, people should aim for 25 to 35 grams per 24-hour interval (Slavin 2008).

Diets for kids that eliminate sources of B12, calcium, and other essential nutrients tin can have dire consequences

Deficiencies of B12 and other nutrients can cause developmental delays, brain disorders, and dumb growth.

This explains why veganism and related diets (like macrobiotics) require conscientious planning to get right.

Diets that heavily restrict or exclude animal-derived foods are scarce in key nutrients. In theory, it's possible to make upwardly for these deficiencies with supplements. But in exercise, some people don't make the proper adjustments.

For example, human infants forced to subsist onmacrobioticdiets have developed scurvy (Dagnelie et al 1990). And various studies have reported that vegan kids are scarce in vitamin B12 (e.yard., Dagnelie et al 1004; Van Dusseldorp et al 1996; Larsson and Johansson 2002).

Beware of the raw, "natural nutrient" diet

In that location is nil incorrect with children eating some raw fruits and vegetables.

Simply diets for kids that consist ofentirelyandexclusively of raw foods? That's another story.

Contrary to what some zealots believe, in that location is nothing "unnatural" about cooked food.

In fact, our hunter-gatherer ancestors began roasting their food long ago. And the introduction of cooking was probably a key event in human evolution, because cooking breaks down indigestible fibers and makes food easier to digest (Wrangham 2009).

When adults attach to a strict, raw foods nutrition, they tend to become quite thin. For kids, such a diet will likely lead to malnutrition, developmental issues, and growth delays.

Beware of low-carb diets for kids

Low-carb diets that restrict the consumption of fruits, vegetables, milk, and whole grains may put kids at chance for vitamin and mineral deficiencies. These restrictions will too result in a nutrition that is too low in fiber.

Beware of plausible-sounding claims about "Paleolithic nutrition" and "bequeathed" diets for kids

You might have heard the statement: We shouldn't eat wheat or legumes or cow's milk products because these foods weren't consumed earlier x,000 years ago. That's not very long ago in evolutionary terms. And so—the argument goes—humans haven't had time to adapt to these new foods.

The problem with this argument is that information technology's based on a fake premise.

X thousand years isn't very long, simply it's been enough time for many populations to evolve new physiological adaptations to the post-Paleolithic world. The best known dietary example is the evolution of lactose tolerance (Tishkoff et al 2007). But it's likely that researchers will discover other cases in time to come.

The bottom line? While individual people might have good, personal reasons for avoiding specific foods, there is no logical reason for all people to reject all mail-Paleolithic foods.

Some fans of  the Paleolithic nutrition fail to recognize the difference between wild foods and supermarket foods.

Consider the vogue for low-carb diets that include the frequent consumption of red meat. To the caste that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate ruby meat (and some ate surprisingly piffling), they were eating very lean, wild game. They weren't eating domesticated livestock, which isn't just higher in fat—information technology'due south besides higher in "bad" saturated fat and lower in "skilful" omega-iii fatty acids (Eaton and Cordain 1997).

So Paleolithic diet doesn't justify eating lots of supermarket scarlet meat.

Simply, as I suggest higher up, there is much to recommend the Paleolithic diet. For more data, see this article virtually hunter-gatherer diet and its implications for creating meliorate diets for kids.

More information

For more articles virtually diet for kids, visit my index.

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References: Healthful diets for kids

Bogin 1997. Evolutionary hypotheses for man childhood. American Journal of Physical Anthropology

Dagnelie PC, van Dusseldorp M, van Staveren WA, and Hautvast JG. 1994. Furnishings of macrobiotic diets on linear growth in infants and children until 10 years of age. Eur J Clin Nutr. 48 Suppl ane:S103-11; discussion S111-2.

Dagnelie PC, Vergote FJ, van Staveren WA, van den Berg H, Dingjan PG, and Hautvast JG. 1990. High prevalence of rickets in infants on macrobiotic diets. Am J Clin Nutr. 51: 202-viii.

Eaton SB, Eaton SB Iii, and Konner MJ. 1999. Paleolithic diet revisited. In West. R. Trevathan, E.O. Smith, and J.J. McKenna (eds), Evolutionary Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kostyak JC, Kris-Etherton P, Bagshaw D, DeLany JP, Farrell PA. 2007. opens in a new window Relative fat oxidation is higher in children than adults. Nutr J. 6:19.

Larsson CL and Johansson GK. 2002. Dietary intake and nutritional status of immature vegans and omnivores in Sweden. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 76(1): 100-106

Marlett JA, McBurney MI, Slavin JL. Position of the American Dietetic Association: Health implications of dietary fiber. J Am Nutrition Assoc. 2002;102(7):993-chiliad.Murphy SP and Allen LH. 2003. Nutritional importance of animal source foods. J Nutr. 133(xi Suppl ii):3932S-3935S.

Tishkoff SA, Reed FA, Ranciaro A, Voight BF, Babbitt CC, Silverman JS., Powell K, Mortensen HM, Hirbo JB, et al. 2007. Convergent accommodation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe. Nature Genetics 39:31-40.

Van Dusseldorp Chiliad, Arts IC, Bergsma JS, De Jong N, Dagnelie PC, and Van Staveren WA. 1996. Catch-upwardly growth in children fed a macrobiotic diet in early babyhood. J Nutr. 126(12):2977-83.

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