Children's Nutritional Scale

It is not a rigid ruler that allows you to measure the number of grams per day to cook for your children, but a professional tool for pediatric nutrition practitioners to evaluate group/individual nutritional status and formulate diet adjustment plans. Ordinary families can use it as a reference for dietary structure. A stuck value will easily lead to picky eaters and increase parenting anxiety.

Last week I met a mother like this at a community child care free clinic. She clutched a crumpled printed internet celebrity chart and said that her 3-year-old child must eat 150g of green leafy vegetables every day, and if she missed 10g, she would have to make up for the next meal. As a result, the baby turned around when seeing green vegetables. Last week, she was constipated for two days because of too much dietary fiber. She felt very aggrieved and said that she had followed the standards completely, so why was there still a problem? I flipped through the watch in her hand. It was compiled by a parenting blogger. It didn’t even mark the most basic Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) ranges. They were all fixed values. This is not called a watch list, but a shackles for parents.

At this point, some people may ask, are the formal children’s nutrition scales useless? Of course not. The current mainstream scales in the industry are actually divided into two directions. There is no absolute right or wrong, but the applicable scenarios are different: one is the standardized age/sex corresponding nutritional intake scale released by the WHO and the Chinese Nutrition Society, which is a public health gold standard based on hundreds of thousands of children's growth data. You can understand it as the passing line for student exams, and is mainly used for group nutrition screening - for example, the iron deficiency rate of preschool children in a certain suburb is high, or the proportion of macronutrients in a kindergarten's meals is unbalanced. Use this benchmark to check the accuracy, and the efficiency is particularly high. The other type is the "Personalized Nutrition Interval Table" promoted by the European and American Pediatric Nutrition Association in recent years. It does not have a fixed value, but only gives a floating range. It also takes into account the child's exercise volume, basal metabolism, food allergy history and even recent illness. It is more suitable for clinical nutritional intervention for individual children. For example, for babies with lactose intolerance, the calcium requirement of dairy products will be converted into the equivalent intake of cheese and dark green vegetables, and the standard of 300ml of fresh milk will not be stuck.

In fact, the controversy over children’s nutrition scales has never stopped in the industry. Many public health scholars believe that a unified fixed numerical scale must be implemented. Otherwise, parents have no idea about nutritional intake, and it is easy for children to suffer from long-term micronutrient deficiencies. Most doctors who do clinical child nutrition support the flexible range version. After all, you can never predict whether a 4-year-old child will run downstairs for three hours today or stay at home and watch cartoons for a day. The consumption will be twice the difference, and the amount of food will certainly be different. Both sides are reasonable. The contradiction is never the scale itself, but that people mix tools for different scenarios: if you are preparing meals for kindergartens or conducting nutritional surveys in regions, you are absolutely right to use standardized scales; if you are cooking for your own children and you are still stuck on the values ​​of 120g of grains and potatoes and 100g of lean meat per day, you are simply looking for trouble for yourself.

Among the parents I usually meet, there are still many who have stepped on the trap of the wild scale. Last month, a grandma used a watch from a short video platform to feed her grandson eggs. She had to eat 3 eggs a day. She said that the watch said that preschoolers should take in enough protein. As a result, the child suffered from excessive protein intake, indigestion and a fever of 38 degrees. When he came to the hospital, he was still mumbling, "I was fed according to the standard." I looked at the table in the video and found that the intake of a 7-10 year old was directly applied to a 3-year-old, without even marking the source. I really want to remind everyone that no matter what scale is used, first check whether the issuing party is an authoritative organization. Don't take a table made up by someone unknown as an edict.

How do ordinary families use this thing? There is really no need to weigh the food on a scale before cooking every day. My advice to parents is to benchmark on a weekly basis: eat green leafy vegetables at least 5 times this week, eat red meat or animal liver 2-3 times, continue to eat milk/dairy products every day, the amount of snacks does not exceed 10% of the total calories of the day, and the baby's growth curve has always been stable at its own percentile, then it is completely up to standard. Just like you make fish-flavored shredded pork according to the recipe and know how to adjust the salt according to your own taste, how can you be completely stuck when feeding your baby?

The mother who was stuck with 150g of vegetables later listened to my advice and stopped weighing vegetables. Sometimes she chopped the vegetables and mixed them into the egg custard, sometimes she made them into small stuffed dumplings, and sometimes she simply gave her baby a small box of blanched broccoli as finger food. When I came for a follow-up visit this month, my baby even dared to ask for the orange candies in my pocket when he saw them. The child care indicators were more stable than before. To put it bluntly, the nutrition scale is a crutch. When you first learn to walk, you can hold it on to avoid falling. If you hold on to it and refuse to take steps on your own, you will stumble instead.