Nine taboos that babies should not violate in their diet

During the growth and development stage of babies, the nutrients obtained from their diet are very important. Babies also have many taboos in their eating habits. Parents must help their babies get rid of bad eating habits so that they can grow up healthy and strong.

The first taboo: partiality

"I have to chase after my baby to feed him every day!", "My baby eats very little and very slowly, and likes to hold the food in his mouth. He hasn't finished eating even when the food is cold!" Faced with the confusion of many parents, medical experts from China and the United States said that some inappropriate behaviors of parents themselves, such as excessive attention to feeding, forced feeding, and coaxing at the dinner table, may aggravate children's picky eating. If the parents themselves are picky eaters, their children will follow suit and become even more picky eaters.

The proportion of children with picky eating habits is as high as 30%.

Professor He Shaoru, chief of pediatrics at Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, pointed out that picky eating is common in children of all ages from 6 months to 6 years old, with the proportion being as high as 30%.

Common problems include eating small and slow amounts of food, a lack of interest in food, a reluctance to try new foods, and a strong preference for certain textures or types of food. He Shaoru emphasized that many families with only one child now have a tense atmosphere of excessive attention to feeding and coercion at the dinner table. Children feel a heavy psychological burden when eating in this oppressive atmosphere and are more disgusted and disgusted with their picky food.

Babies who are picky eaters are more likely to follow their parents’ lead

In addition, parents' own picky eating behaviors may aggravate children's picky eating. Experts particularly pointed out that if parents themselves have picky eating behaviors, children’s subconscious “imitation” will also make the picky eating behaviors difficult to control. The so-called "if the upper beam is crooked, the lower beams will be crooked" effect.

Professor He Shaoru said that children’s problematic eating behaviors may lead to a series of health problems such as malnutrition and developmental delay. For picky eaters, drug treatment has little effect, and behavioral correction is more important. Professor He Shaoru prescribed the following "prescription": allow the baby to experience hunger moderately, allow him (her) not to eat if he (she) is full, and reduce distractions during meals (TV, stories, toys). In addition, using various types of molds on the market to make food into interesting shapes can stimulate children's appetite in terms of color, aroma and taste. He Shaoru pointed out that when necessary, parents should consult experts in related fields to provide necessary training for their children's oral movements. Under current conditions, parents can refer to the following methods to solve children's picky eating and partial eating behaviors:

1. Let your baby experience hunger and then feel full.

2. Limit calories between meals and avoid beverages and snacks one hour before meals.

3. The meal time is less than 25 minutes, and the interval between each meal is 3.5 to 4 hours.

4. When the child pushes away the bowl and chopsticks, cries, or turns his head away, the parents take temporary isolation measures, move the food away, put the child in the dining chair and ignore him.

5. Go to the market or supermarket and let the children decide what to buy.

6. Allow your child to try new or disliked foods multiple times.

7. Give foods interesting names.

8. Create a happy eating atmosphere.

The second "ban": squatting to eat

In Guanzhong, when it is time to eat, adults and children like to squat under the trees at the entrance of the village, in front of or behind the houses to eat. This is known as one of the eight strange things. In fact, this is a bad eating habit, which not only affects the gastrointestinal digestion of food, but also easily causes food to be contaminated to varying degrees, causing "diseases from the mouth".

When you eat while squatting, your abdomen is squeezed. In addition to preventing the gastrointestinal tract from moving normally, the gas in the gastrointestinal tract cannot move smoothly up and down, causing bloating in the upper abdomen and affecting the digestion and absorption of food.

Squatting for a long time will compress the abdomen and lower limbs, which will lead to poor blood circulation throughout the body, soreness and numbness in the lower limbs. The peristalsis and tension of the stomach will increase, requiring a large amount of blood. Squatting will affect the blood supply to the stomach, which will directly weaken the stomach's digestive function.

If you sit on a high stool to eat, your abdominal muscles will relax, blood circulation will not be obstructed, and your gastrointestinal function will work regularly and normally, which is very beneficial for digesting food.

In addition, when people squat to eat and put the dishes on the ground, dust will be raised when people walk around or when it is windy and fall on the food. The dirt on the dust and its bacteria, viruses, parasite eggs, etc. will contaminate the food and easily cause disease.

Therefore, from a health care perspective, this bad habit of squatting to eat should be corrected.

The third taboo: overeating

Babies may suffer from gastrointestinal diseases due to overeating, hot and humid climate, etc.

Performance:

Vomiting, abdominal distension, chest tightness, and anorexia.

Diet therapy:

Skim milk - Boil the milk, cool it down and remove the fat film floating on the surface. Repeat this process several times to make skim milk. It can treat baby vomiting, but it is not suitable for infants and young children.

Apple puree soup - Mash ripe apples into a puree and add to weak tea. Apple fibers are finer, causing less irritation to the intestines, and are rich in pectin, which has an astringent effect.

Light tea - brew a small amount of black tea with boiling water and give it to your baby 4-5 times a day. It has a good effect on acute gastroenteritis.

Carrot juice - Wash and mash fresh carrots, add a small amount of water and boil for 10-15 minutes. Filter, then add water and a small amount of sugar. After boiling, pour into a container and boil for 10 minutes before drinking.

Hawthorn, rice and brown sugar juice - fry the hawthorn in a casserole into a thick juice, then add rice and brown sugar to cook porridge, and give it to your baby in the morning and afternoon. Avoid eating on an empty stomach.

Special tips:

List of foods that need to be fasted at this time:

Spicy and cold foods are more likely to harm the baby's stomach.

Greasy food can cause your baby to vomit.

Foods that cause bloating can aggravate your baby's bloating and loss of appetite.

Food that is difficult to digest.

Fourth "prohibition": salty food

Salt is the main ingredient in all seasonings, and table salt can be said to be the king among condiments. In the modern diet, children's sodium intake is gradually increasing, which is due to both excessive salt in the family's three meals a day and increased sodium content in snacks. Recently, child health experts pointed out that both healthy children and sick children should not consume too much salt and their diet should be light.

Too much salt can cause respiratory infections. According to survey statistics, more and more children are suffering from high blood pressure, and most of these children often ate salty food when they were infants. Too salty food increases blood pressure and causes edema. In addition, eating too much salt in children is still a risk factor for upper respiratory tract infections.

First, a high-salt diet reduces oral saliva secretion, making it more conducive for various bacteria and viruses to exist in the upper respiratory tract;

Secondly, after a high-salt diet, the osmotic effect of salt can kill the normal parasitic flora in the upper respiratory tract, causing dysbacteriosis and leading to illness;

Third, a high-salt diet may inhibit the reproduction of mucosal epithelial cells, causing them to lose their disease resistance.

These factors will weaken the ability of the upper respiratory tract mucosa to resist disease invasion. In addition, children's immune system is lower than that of adults, and they are more susceptible to cold. Various bacteria and viruses take the opportunity to enter the body and cause upper respiratory tract diseases.

Eating salt affects zinc absorption. Children's taste follows their parents. If their parents' eating habits tend to be salty, their children will also like to eat salty food. Eating too much salty food directly affects the absorption of zinc in children, leading to zinc deficiency in children. However, many people like to eat pickled mustard greens, salted fish and bacon. These foods are generally high in sodium and children should try to avoid them. In addition, bean paste, hot sauce, mustard tuber, pickled cabbage, pickled cucumbers, yellow paste (soy sauce), fermented bean curd, salted duck eggs, canned food, sausage, pork floss, fried dough sticks and instant noodles should also be avoided as much as possible.

Fifth "ban": fast food

At present, there is a common phenomenon among children and teenagers that they eat too fast, especially breakfast and lunch.

The survey shows that 20.3% of children finish breakfast within 5 minutes, and 85.5% of children finish breakfast within 15 minutes; lunch is also quick, with 18.3% of children finishing lunch within 10 minutes, and 72.5% of children taking no more than 20 minutes to eat lunch.

Only dinner can be a little more leisurely, but nearly half of the children and teenagers still finish dinner within 20 minutes.

Researchers point out that eating too fast is not good for children's physical and mental health. If children eat too fast, they will not be able to savor and appreciate the flavor of the food, so the meal only serves to fill their stomachs. It neither stimulates and cultivates the joy of eating nor is it conducive to the digestion and absorption of nutrients. If you eat too fast, the food cannot be fully chewed and cannot be initially digested through saliva. This increases the digestive burden of the gastrointestinal tract, thereby prolonging the digestion time and reducing the proportion of nutrients digested and absorbed. In addition, eating too fast can easily lead to overeating and eating too much, which can cause obesity.

Generally speaking, it is best for children to spend no less than 20 minutes eating each meal.

Sixth "ban": sweets

The sugars that people often eat in daily life include white sugar, brown sugar, rock sugar, fruit sugar, etc. These are all extracted from sugarcane or beets and are collectively called sucrose. Although children like to eat sweets, they should not eat too much sugar.

Eating too much sugar can cause malnutrition in your baby. Sugar is a pure energy food that contains almost no other nutrients. It has been determined that every gram of sugar can produce 4 kilocalories in the body, so eating sugar often causes people to eat less. As a result, although the body needs a lot of calories, other nutrients such as protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, dietary fiber, etc. are insufficient, which will cause nutritional imbalance over time.

Sugar consumes a lot of calcium in the baby's body. Sugar is an acidic substance, which neutralizes the alkaline substance calcium in the body. Calcium deficiency in the body not only directly affects the growth and development of children, making them short, but the more prominent harm is that it causes osteoporosis and rickets.

Eating sugar frequently can easily cause tooth decay. Sugar provides good conditions for the bacteria in the mouth to grow and multiply. These bacteria and residual sugar together can increase the acidity of teeth, between teeth and in the mouth. Since teeth are often eroded by acid, it is easy to cause caries, which will form cavities or oral ulcers over time. Therefore, Japanese dentists recommend that the first prerequisite for preventing tooth decay is to eat less sugary foods.

Eating too much sugar will also weaken the body's resistance and make the baby susceptible to various diseases.

Sugar is an indispensable food in our daily life, so how much should children eat every day? In recent years, the consensus at home and abroad is that it is advisable to control it at around 0.5 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. That is to say, adults should not exceed 50 grams per day, children should not exceed 20 grams, and children under 10 kilograms should not exceed 10 grams.

The seventh taboo: watching food

First, it can easily affect appetite

In addition to physiological factors that can cause appetite, external factors can also enhance appetite through conditioned reflexes. If people watch TV while eating, they tend to focus on the TV and ignore the taste of the food, which causes their appetite to decrease or disappear due to the suppression of TV. Over time, malnutrition will occur.

Second, it affects the digestion of food and the absorption of nutrients

When people eat, they need digestive juices and blood to help the stomach and intestines digest food. Watching TV while eating also requires a lot of blood to the brain. In this way, they compete with each other for blood supply. As a result, if both sides cannot get enough blood, they will not be able to eat well or watch TV well. Over time, dizziness and blurred vision may occur.

Therefore, don’t watch TV while eating at home. It’s best to watch TV 20-30 minutes after a meal. If you must watch TV, watch less or no programs that are emotionally stimulating.

The eighth prohibition: eating while walking

Eating while riding in a vehicle or walking is very unhygienic and not conducive to the digestion and absorption of food, which will affect your health over time.

In the car and on the road, there are people coming and going, and the dust is flying. Food can easily be contaminated, especially when children eat in the car. It is easy for the bacteria and viruses on the armrests to contaminate the food through their hands, and then cause illness when they eat it.

In addition, the nutrients in food must go through two digestion processes before they can be absorbed and utilized by the human body, namely physical and chemical digestion. Chewing with teeth, stirring with tongue, gastrointestinal motility, etc. belong to physical digestion; amylase in saliva, pepsin in gastric juice, trypsin in pancreatic juice, and bile, etc., digest starch, protein, and fat in food, which belongs to chemical digestion.

Both types of digestion are completed under the unified command of the brain. However, when eating while riding in a car or walking, the brain has to command both the digestive system and the motor system, and its energy is dispersed, so people often do not chew thoroughly and digest food poorly. It may also cause choking and tongue biting, causing food to accidentally enter the trachea and cause foreign matter in the trachea. Especially when eating food with a core while riding in a car, accidents are more likely to occur.

Ninth “Prohibition”: Laughing Food

Children laughing and playing while eating, the elderly being distracted while eating, or taking medicine due to deterioration of reflex function may cause organs to inhale foreign objects and cause suffocation. If this happens, first aid should be used to quickly remove the foreign body. Never rely on luck, otherwise it may take someone's life within minutes. But special attention should be paid to not allowing the child to make large movements at this time. Parents generally cannot remove the foreign body by themselves, and should send the child to the hospital immediately.