Nutritious meals for children

There is no universal "standard answer" for children's nutritious meals. The core is to match the child's individual digestion ability, dietary preferences, and growth curve growth needs, rather than copying the precise grams, fancy shapes, or fixed ingredient combinations of Internet celebrity recipes.

I was visiting my best friend's house a while ago, and I saw her squatting in the kitchen using a food scale to weigh broccoli. In front of her was a "Daily Nutritional Intake Chart for 3-Year-Old Children" posted by a parenting blogger, with the standard portion of 150g of green leafy vegetables stuck on it. Her child just started kindergarten and was already a little constipated. She still forced the child to eat enough every day. As a result, the child now covers his mouth when he sees green vegetables and refuses to even eat properly. I have been working as a community nutrition guide for children for three years, and I have seen this kind of scene too many times.

The content related to children's nutrition that everyone has access to now is actually two completely different systems. It's hard to say who is right and who is wrong, but the applicable scenarios are different. One is the group reference standards given in the public health field, such as the dietary pagoda for preschool children in the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)". The recommended amounts of cereals, potatoes, meat and eggs, fruits and vegetables, milk and dairy products are calculated based on the growth data of a large number of healthy children. If your child does not have picky eaters or weak digestion, there will be basically no problems if you follow this broad framework. I met a 6-year-old boy before. His parents are middle school teachers. He is very strict in doing things. He cooks for the child according to the approximate quantities of the pagoda every day and does not do any fancy work. The child's growth curve has been stable at the 75th percentile. He rarely catches a cold throughout the year. Even the dentist praised his well-developed teeth.

However, when applied to individuals, this set of standards often fails to adapt to the environment. The other group of pediatricians and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and nutrition who are working hard on the clinical front line are opposed to the practice of picking out the grams - after all, each child's digestive ability is so different, how can we use the same standard? Let’s just say that my best friend’s baby has a weak spleen and stomach. He can’t digest vegetables with high fiber content if he eats them too much. The stuffing will only increase the burden on the gastrointestinal tract and make the absorption of nutrients worse. Later, I asked her not to worry about the grams. I chopped the vegetables and mixed them with the meat to make small balls. I only gave her half a bowl a day. I temporarily stopped the whole grains and replaced them with soft rice. After only half a month, the child's constipation was cured and her weight increased by half a catty.

Don't believe it, there are parents who actually go to three supermarkets to buy chia seeds and blueberries in the middle of the night in order to get the ingredients for their recipes. As a result, their children don't even eat a bite. It's all a waste of effort. When my own child first entered kindergarten, I was also superstitious about the idea of ​​"gathering together four types of ingredients at once". When I woke up in the morning, I steamed pumpkins and cut strawberries. After half an hour of tossing, my child was only willing to eat half an egg. Later, I simply lay down on my back, and when I got up late, I made an egg roll with chopped lettuce, a hot glass of milk, and half a stick of boiled corn. It seemed simple, and the required carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins were all present. The child ate well, and I saved my energy. By the way, there are also those who make cartoon rice balls and animal steamed buns. To put it bluntly, they are just a transitional method for picky eaters. If your child is not picky to begin with, there is no need to put in that effort. Good-looking food is never a must-have for nutritious meals.

Last year, the Chinese Nutrition Society released survey data. The correlation between the nutritional compliance rate of preschool children and whether parents strictly follow recipes is only 12%. Instead, it is much more closely related to "whether children's eating wishes are respected" and "whether there are 20 types of ingredients per week." You see, you don’t actually need to collect seven or eight kinds of food for every meal. You can eat a variety of things in a week, which is better than anything else.

I had a meal with a nutritionist from the Provincial Department of Child Health Insurance a while ago, and I particularly agree with what he said: "Everyone thinks of children's nutritional meals in a complicated way. As long as the children eat without upset stomach, have a normal height and weight, and rarely get sick, your family's meals are the best nutritious meals. There are not so many fancy rules." ”

After all, eating is a happy thing. Don't make adults tired and children resisted by trying to meet "standards". In fact, the gains outweigh the losses.