How to eat when growing?

This is the 2615th article of Da Yi Xiao Hu

Childhood and adolescence is a critical period for the development of a person's physical and intellectual development, and is also an important period for the formation of a person's behavior and lifestyle. Children and adolescents grow faster during puberty, and their needs for various nutrients increase, so they should be given full attention. Adequate nutritional intake can ensure their normal physical and intellectual development, and lay a good foundation for health in adulthood and even throughout their lives. Today, let's talk about two important dietary issues during childhood and adolescence.

1. Eat three meals at regular times and make sure you have a good breakfast

Children and adolescents should develop the habit of eating at regular times and regular amounts. Try to avoid replacing normal rice, meat and vegetable staples and side dishes with cakes and sweets.

As children and adolescents grow older, their schoolwork burden increases, their activities expand, and their work and rest schedules may not be regular. At this time, we should pay attention to ensuring that their three meals are regular and quantitative. In particular, we should emphasize ensuring that they have a good breakfast.

Skipping breakfast will affect learning and health. Breakfast is an important source of energy and nutrients for the day, and plays an important role in the nutrition and health of the human body. Eating a nutritious breakfast every day can provide children and adolescents with the energy and various nutrients needed for physical and intellectual development. Skipping breakfast or having an insufficient breakfast will not only affect academic performance and physical fitness, but also affect the function of the digestive system, which is not good for health. Therefore, you should eat breakfast every day and ensure that the breakfast is nutritious enough.

Eat a variety of foods for breakfast, and the energy intake from breakfast should be sufficient. Breakfast should include cereals, such as rice, steamed bread, bread, etc., because cereal foods can be quickly converted into glucose in the human body, which is conducive to maintaining blood sugar stability and ensuring the energy required for brain activity. Therefore, cereal foods are an indispensable part of breakfast. In addition, it is best to include milk or soy milk in breakfast. Milk and soy milk are rich in calcium, which is one of the nutrients necessary for the physical growth of children and adolescents. In addition, eggs can also be added. The egg yolk contains phospholipids, which is conducive to supplying the nutrients needed for brain development. If conditions permit, you can also add some meat to breakfast, such as lean shredded meat, minced meat, etc., which not only increases the taste, but also increases the intake of high-quality protein. In addition, it is also necessary to add vegetables and fruits to breakfast.

2. Avoid blind dieting

As children and adolescents grow older, their understanding of beauty deepens, and they pay more and more attention to their appearance. Especially when they reach puberty, they will begin to pursue perfect appearance, such as intentionally dieting to pursue a perfect body shape. This situation is more common in adolescent girls. As adolescent girls grow, their body shape gradually transitions to maturity. In response to this, they are prone to anxiety, shyness, and nervousness, and they will have the desire to keep their body shape "slim". Slim here certainly does not refer to slenderness in our popular sense, but the pursuit of thin body shape. Often, we will see girls who are obviously within a reasonable and normal weight range, but still think they are fat and want to diet to lose weight. A small number of girls have adverse effects on their health because of blind dieting, using extreme practices such as vomiting and taking laxatives. This practice will form a conditioned reflex over time, and evolve into nausea when encountering food, or vomiting when hearing words related to eating, which will eventually lead to anorexia nervosa, malnutrition, and skinny, resulting in delayed growth and development, and even life-threatening in severe cases. Therefore, children and adolescents should be cautious about dieting. Even if they really want to lose weight because they are overweight or obese, they should achieve the goal of weight loss by increasing physical exercise.

Author: Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention

Jenny Zhu