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Excerpt: How Children Grow
SSR: Writing
Effects of Nutrition
A concern of scientists for over a century has been the identification of foods essential to growth. Today, they are working to define those foods that best prevent or cure childhood growth disorders stemming from malnutrition. Nutritionists are also looking into the possibility that the growth differences between boys and girls may require that the two sexes be put on different diets right from birth. And in the future lies yet another horizon: definition of the foods that result in optimal—and not necessarily maximal—body development throughout life.
As the relationship between nutrition and growth becomes understood in a more sophisticated way, the failure of a child to adhere to universal patterns of growth is not so readily ascribed, as in the past, to genetic predisposition. Instead, such deviations arc being interpreted as possible signs of undernutrition or overnutrition that can be prevented and possibly cured.
Scientists know that at least 45 nutrients are basic to the maintenance of healthy growth. Lack of these nutrients over a period of time may depress appetite, encourage disease, and thus retard childhood growth. Conversely, the child whose growth rate is too slow from nonnutritional causes may also have a small appetite and decreased resistance to disease. Despite this cycle of contributing factors, precise methods of cell counting and analyzing body composition have led researchers to conclude that only two elements of diet—protein and caloric content—are of preeminent importance to normal growth.
Milk produced by an adequately nourished mother—or that provided in a specially prescribed milk formula—contains, in appropriate quantities, all protein and calories required for an in-fant to grow normally. Even the milk of the poorly nourished nursing mother, often deficient in volume and vitamin supply, can provide an infant with the basic nutrients required in his very early growth period.
As the child decreases his milk intake and turns to solid foods, a daily diet containing a sufficient and varied quantity of foods from the four basic groups, 1) meat, poultry, fish, and eggs; 2) vegetables and fruit; 3) milk and milk products; and 4) enriched breads and cereal, provides proper proteins and sufficient calories to allow continuing growth. Such a balanced diet will also help build up the large store of nutrients essential for the accelerated growth demands that will be precipitated later by puberty and, in the female by childbearing. For the pregnant teenager, a wholesome nutritional background is of special importance; the expectant mother who is young and still growing must meet her own dietary growth needs at the same time she is providing essential nutrients to her growing fetus.
Calories have been implicated in cell multiplication. Protein, on the other hand, may be related primarily to the ability of cells to enlarge. Scientists are beginning to suspect that failure of cells to receive sufficient proteins and calories during certain periods of body growth may lead to slowing down and, ultimately, to cessation of the ability of the cells to enlarge, divide, and develop specialized functions. . . .
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