CHILD NUTRITION AND SOCIETY

The food our children eat has an enormous impact on their health and development. From the moment they're born, children are involved in an extreme sport called growth. Infants will spend as much as 38% of the energy they take in just to sustain their growth. The ability to fight off disease, heal from injuries, and achieve developmental milestones like walking, talking, and learning at school are all dependent on a steady input of the right fuel: good nutrition.

Besides fueling growth and development, food plays many other important roles in our children's lives. Meals are a way for families to connect and a safe forum in which children can learn the skills of communication, share their concerns, and gain valuable social skills. Through food, traditions are passed from one generation to the next and children learn about where they come from, who they are and, in some ways, who they want to be.

Of course, not all kinds of food support our children's healthy growth and development equally. While children certainly need energy in the form of calories, where those calories come from is important too. Growing bodies need the right balance of specialized building blocks as well as the energy to build. When building a house, the quality of the raw materials matters. The same can be said for the raw materials (food) that contribute to the growth and development of a child. To take that analogy a few steps further, when a contractor is building a house, she knows that the foundations have to be solid, or the house will be unstable and less likely to withstand stresses. The house needs to be held together by small but critical components like good-quality screws and strong nails. We can think of these as the vitamins and minerals that are critically important for our children's health, even though they're only needed in relatively small amounts. Finally, in order to make a house a home, it needs to be filled with love. Our children's food should be made with love too. When we outsource the job of feeding our children, by choosing too many highly processed foods, for example, we sacrifice the quality of the raw materials that are available to support their health. In general, processed food manufacturers have a major, vested interest in generating profits and comparatively little interest in protecting the long-term health of the people who consume their food. The opposite is true when a parent or loving caregiver cooks a family meal using mostly whole food ingredients.

Families around the world have very different ways of feeding their children and many of these choices are influenced by the culture into which a child is born. The questions of what, when, how, and how much to eat are largely defined by what's considered normal or desirable within the family, the neighborhood, and even the country that a child calls home.

The environment in which children grow up significantly affects the foods they end up eating and, in this way, the environment will affect their long-term health. We see examples of this when we look at the very different collections of nutritional problems faced by children growing up in developed and developing countries.

In developed countries, like the United States, children are much more likely to be overfed, and have diets that are too high in nutrient-poor, calorie-dense foods. Diets like this, that are chronically low in nutrient density, raise a child's risk of suffering from over-nutrition, a form of malnutrition that often leads to chronic conditions of excess, like overweight and obesity in childhood. Childhood obesity raises the risk of many other chronic diseases, like heart disease and diabetes. The culture of eating in many developed countries, like the US, has developed to favor a model in which the consumption of excessive amounts of low-quality nutrition is all too often the norm. This trend is fueled by economic factors that make low-cost, highly processed foods readily available to families in these parts of the world.

In contrast, if we look at the developing world, children growing up in resource-poor areas may be more likely to suffer from under-nutrition due to insufficient availability of adequate foods. These children may end up deficient in protein or total calories and the under-nutrition that results comes with a separate list of health risks and complications. Under-nourished children often suffer from immune suppression, meaning that their bodies cannot effectively fight off infectious diseases.

What other factors influence the foods our children end up eating? At the level of the family, there are many factors that influence food choices: What resources (including time and money) does the family have to devote to buying and preparing fresh, healthful food? In parts of the world where access to electricity and running water are limited, safe food preparation as well as access to ingredients can be a major stumbling block for parents who may find themselves unable to provide nutritious meals for their growing children. The number of children in any given family also affects the distribution of resources. So, in parts of the world where women may not have access to contraception, large numbers of children may place an economic burden on families, negatively affecting the nutrition status of children. In the United States and other developed parts of the world, parents may feel they don't have time to prepare healthful meals for their children or they may feel they lack the skills necessary to cook a balanced meal. Perhaps these barriers seem trivial at first, especially when compared with the profound lack of resources seen in other parts of the world. But, whenever parents and caregivers find themselves unable to provide nutritious foods for their children on a regular basis, the long-term health of those children will suffer.

The education available to parents and caregivers also plays a large role in defining the nutritional status of our children. When parents are educated about the importance of good nutrition, they are often more likely to subtly reallocate resources, no matter how limited those resources may be, in support of their children. Parents who have received even a basic exposure to...