INFANT NUTRITION

The first year of life is extremely critical to infants.  Their nutrition, the foods they eat, and the associations they form around food will influence the quality and length of the rest of their lives.  This includes physical, mental, and social development, and to a great degree the diseases they will manifest later in life.

During the first year of life, growth is faster than ever again.  The birth weight doubles in the first four months and increases by 30 percent in the next eight months.  A typical example might go like this:  birth weight/7 pounds; weight at four months/14 pounds; weight as 12 months/21 pounds.

Suppose that same growth rate took place for the first five years.  The typical three year old would weight in at 209 pounds!  Or, if this happened to a typical nine year old boy, he would go from 60 pounds at nine to 160 pounds in one year.  One point to make here is that babies are not “little adults”; they are more like an entirely different species.

From the first to second birthday, a typical weight gain might be five pounds or a little more.  The changes during the first year are critically important, and they include every organ and organ system.  You see, as adults, our organs have, for the most part, stopped growing; but the baby is forming new tissue in all of the organs in his/her body.  During these rapid and important growth changes, optimal nutrition is vital.

At birth, the baby can suck very powerfully thanks to some fat pads in the cheeks.  By about six weeks, the baby can move his/her tongue against the palate to swallow semi-solid foods.  At first, the digestive system is only capable of digesting milk, sugar, lactose; and at about three months, it can start handling starch.

From birth and for up to a year or longer, kidneys are inefficient at concentrating waste materials, so an excessive amount of water is excreted to eliminate wastes.  Along with a large water loss comes the potential for dehydration, which can occur much more quickly and easily in an infant than an adult.  To complicate matters, the infant can only communicate by crying.  It’s important to remember that the crying may simply be an expression of thirst.  There’s nothing wrong with giving the infant a drink of good pure water.

For the first three months of life that a child is being either breast or bottle fed, he/she may not require any additional supplements.  The infant was born with some nutrient reserves; and if he/she feeds well, there should be no shortages.  If you are breast feeding, you should make sure that you follow a nutritional program,and your baby will do just fine.  That does not mean, however, that the baby doesn’t need additional water.  If you have a water purifier, the water should still be sterilized.  If you don’t have purified water, you can purchase some for baby feeding.  Just be sure you sterilize it for the first few months.

Breast feeding is nature’s way.  But nature didn’t plan on women drinking lots of coffee, alcohol, or other foods that contain psychologically active chemicals.  We know this intuitively because the alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and other chemicals pass through your milk to the baby.  You have an obligation as the steward of your baby’s health to limit your uses of chemicals during the months or years that you nurse the baby.  It would be nice if you husbands would support your wife by also abstaining from the chemicals while she is nursing.

A second obligation has to do with other problems in our food supply.  Pesticides and other chemicals that you would never think of giving your baby can be avoided for the most part by taking a little extra care to wash and rinse your own vegetables, fruits and grains.  In our house, we use a little biodegradable detergent in water and then give everything an extra rinsing.

If you feel that your baby could use a supplement, the only two supplement cautions are vitamins A and D.  They can be given to excess and over a period of time can cause problems.  Therefore, you must select a supplement designed for toddlersand use a little common sense. We usually count a toddler as an infant about one year old. Toddlers weight about 20 pounds, so if your baby is about average at birth, say 7 pounds, he/she is about one-third the size of a toddler. The ideal toddler supplement is a powder that’s designed to provide 50% of the daily value for all vitamins and most minerals per serving of the supplement. For example, the powder supplement should be added to orange juice or some other food the baby is being fed. The concept is to provide 50 percent of the daily value per serving to insure complete nutrition by complementing the baby’s food.

Take the serving size for toddlers and give the baby one-fourth; that would be a safe supplement level for infants at two or three months. By three months, many pediatricians permit the use of diluted orange or apple juice; either one makes an excellent vehicle for the supplement.

Information obtained from Dr. Bruce B. Miller, A Better Health Series, Optimal Nutrition for Healthy Children.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 3:37 pm and is filed under CHILDRENS HEALTH, health, minerals, nutrition, vitamins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.