Starting Your Child Off on the Right Foot
by Dallas Clouatre, Ph.D.
It has long been known that an
infant’s diet is important for mental
development. Increasingly research
is showing that the diet and
everyday environmental factors
during the first three to five years of
life can have important consequences
in the areas of mental health and the
ability to interact socially as well as determining
whether the child will grow up
obese, develop diabetes or suffer from heart
disease in later life. Moreover, it seems that
the mother’s eating habits and overall health
during her pregnancy may contribute greatly
to her child’s health and even determine her
child’s risks for major diseases in adulthood.
To an amazing degree, starting your child off
properly with regard to nutrition begins
during pregnancy and requires special
attention during the first half decade of life.
Unfortunately, we Americans have been
losing this earliest of nutritional battles. For
instance, obesity has reached epidemic proportions
in children. Commenting on her
report on children’s health issued just this
year by the National Academy of Pediatrics,
Dr. Nancy Krebs, a pediatrician at the
University of Colorado, said, “If you look at
the number of kids who are overweight or at
risk, you’re talking over 25 percent of our
kids. If some infectious disease was affecting
25 percent to 30 percent of our children, you
can be sure we’d be looking for some kind of
vaccine.” In fact, the percentage of those who
are seriously overweight has doubled among
children six to 11 years old from about seven
percent of those surveyed in the period 1976
to 1980 to more than 15 percent in the period
1999 to 2000. Obesity in 12- to 19-year-olds
jumped from five to 15 percent over the same
period. According to the National Center for
Health Statistics, some 10.4 percent of
preschoolers are obese, which is cause for
concern given that children who are obese
at age four have a 20 percent risk of being
obese in adulthood. If they continue to be
overweight as adolescents, they have an 80
percent chance of being overweight or obese
as adults.
With obesity comes diabetes. According
to Dr. Lori Laffel, head of the pediatric unit
at Boston’s Joslin Diabetes Center. “Over the
years, we always saw an occasional child with
type II [diabetes]. It was a handful a year.”
That was before the 1990s, when overweight
parents began to bring in their similarly large
children with type II diabetes. In that decade,
the number of children with so-called
“adult” diabetes increased approximately 500
percent and the rate has doubled again since
then. Similar increases are reported at other
institutions. Regarding this type of diabetes
in children, Dr. Phillip Lee, head of pediatric
endocrinology at UCLA, says, “We just didn’t
see it. Now referrals of type II are almost 50
percent of our diabetes cases.” Diabetes and
prediabetes (also called Syndrome X or the
metabolic syndrome) ominously are linked
to not just obesity, but hypertension, cardiovascular
disease and yet other conditions.
Can anything be done? Research says yes.
In the area of mental health, a study published
this year in the American Journal of
Psychiatry found that children aged three to
five years old who took part in an enrichment
program that included attention
to diet, exercise and preschool education
were 31.9 percent less
likely to develop personality
disorders and 27.9 percent less
likely to engage in antisocial
behavior in their late teens.
They also were 35 percent
less likely to show criminal
behavior at age 23.
Good nutrition was
found to be the single
most significant factor
in this program, which
included more protein
(fish, chicken and
mutton), salad with
lunch and an afternoon
nap. The head of the
study noted that “this
suggests that proper
nutrition, exercise and
cognitive stimulation in
preschool very likely
will create better
behavior 20 years later.
Perhaps what is critical
is the establishment of
good habits early on in
life—when the brain is
growing.”
Just as a lack of proper nutrition leads
to poor cognitive development, overeating of
empty calories combined with too little exercise
has negative consequences. Most nutritionists
blame inactivity and overeating for
the rise in childhood obesity and diabetes. In
other words, too much TV and soft drinks
(each serving supplying 200–300 calories
from simple sugars). The World Health
Organization in 2003 recommended that no
more than 10 percent of the diet should
consist of simple sugars, yet the average for
all Americans is at least 25 percent of the
diet. For many children, between sugared
breakfast cereals and even more sugar-laden
sodas, the figure is more likely 50 percent.
The role of sweetened drinks, not just
sodas, but the sugared 10 percent juice
drinks that have almost totally displaced
water in the lives of modern American
children, is quite significant. Food nutritionists
at Cornell University, during a two-month study, found that children do not reduce how much food they eat at meals
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| To an amazing degree, starting your child off properly with
regard to nutrition begins during pregnancy and requires
special attention during the first half decade of life. |
to match the number of calories they consume
in sweetened drinks. Instead, the more sweetened
drinks they consume, the greater their daily
caloric intake and the greater their weight gain.
According to David Levitsky, professor of
nutritional sciences and of psychology at
Cornell, this survey of 30 children ages six to
12 supports previous findings that excessive
sweetened drink consumption adversely
affects nutrition and promotes obesity in
school-age children. For the purposes of this
study, sweetened drinks included fizzy drinks,
fruit punch and bottled tea or drinks made
from fruit-flavored powders, such as grape and
lemonade. According to the study, children
who drank more than 16 ounces a day of
sweetened drinks consumed four ounces less
milk than children who avoided sweetened
drinks. Their diets supplied 20 per cent less
phosphorus, 19 per cent less protein and magnesium,
16 per cent less calcium and 10 per
cent less vitamin A plus less zinc, even though
these children also took in 244 more calories a
day from these beverages. The ingestion of
sweetened drinks led to the consumption of
only two ounces less solid food, although such
drinks routinely displaced milk.
Particularly disturbing with regard to these
sweetened drinks and other sugary products is
very recent work which shows that the excessive
consumption of sugars actually alters brain
receptors such that individuals in the future feel
the need—based on lasting changes in brain
physiology and chemistry—to eat sugar.
On the other side of the energy equation,
children now exercise less than in previous
decades. According to a study by the Centers
for Disease Control, 22.6 percent of American
children (ages 9–13) do not engage in any
free-time activity and nearly two-thirds do not
participate in any organized physical activity
during their non-school hours.
The first step in protecting a child’s nutritional
status can be taken as early as pregnancy.
Two areas in the development of the fetus
are particularly susceptible to poor nutrition.
These are neurological development and metabolic
control. The first often is associated with
attention deficit disorder ADD and attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The
second is linked to obesity and diabetes in
childhood and adulthood.
According to the National Institute of
Mental Health (NIMH), ADHD affects approximately
two million American children or
approximately three to five percent of the
school-age population and is about four times
more common in boys than in girls. ADHD
usually becomes apparent at about age three.
Symptoms include inattention, inability to
concentrate, failure to listen when spoken to,
hyperactivity, squirming, talking out of turn,
impulsiveness, disruptive behavior, sleep problems
and poor learning ability.
A number of nutritional scientists argue
that ADHD is a birth defect caused by deficiencies
of maternal DHA (docosahexaenoic acid)
during pregnancy and while nursing, and the
virtual absence of DHA and AA (arachidonic
acid) in infant formulas. (AA is a long-chain
omega-6 fatty acid found primarily in meat
and eggs, whereas the omega-3 fatty acids EPA
[eicosapentaenoic acid] and DHA are found
primarily in the fat of cold-water fish.) DHA in
particular is required to support fetal visual
acuity, neurological and brain development.
Mothers who are overweight also give to their
children a tendency toward weight gain, insulin
resistance and diabetes, which is to say that they
predispose their offspring to Syndrome X.Many
doctors and medical researchers are quite concerned
regarding the future of American children
because recent generations of U.S. adults
have been increasingly overweight and obese.
Indeed, present estimates place more than 60
percent of all American adults in these categories.
Even if most Americans were to adopt
new eating and exercise habits, it would take
literally generations to reverse the inherited
metabolic pattern because maternal obesity
undesirably activates certain genes in offspring.
Fortunately, supplement makers have
begun to address these earliest of nutritional
issues by producing products designed for use
by pregnant and nursing mothers. Such formulas
incorporate nutrients important for
blood sugar regulation, such as chromium,
along with DHA, to support the infant’s neurological
development. Often even the name of
the product will indicate the importance of
these factors. Hence, Jarrow Formulas produces
a product called Preg-Natal®+DHA, and
other companies similarly offer such products.
Jarrow also offers MaxDHA, an essential fatty
acid concentrate which maximizes the amount
of DHA available.
Nutrition during the first five years, as
noted above, can have a major impact on adolescent
and even adult mental and physical
development. Many supplement makers
produce vitamin drops for young children.
Once children are a bit older, chewable
vitamin and mineral supplements can be
added to give insurance with regard to basic
nutrition. The principle here is the same as a
once per day adult multi, only in this case
designed with dosages appropriate for younger
ages. (Chewable vitamins should always be
carefully stored out of reach of children.)
Two other supplements make sense for use
with children. These are essential fatty acids
and probiotics. Because essential fatty acids are
inadequately supplied in the diets of most
Americans and the balance between omega-6
and omega-3 essential fatty acids is so strongly
skewed toward the former, a supplemental
source of essential fatty acids is virtually a
necessity. Essential Balance, Jr. from Omega
Nutrition is an item that can be used with children
as young as six months and can be mixed
with applesauce, cereals, puddings and so forth
to supply a 1-to-1 balance of omega-6 and
omega-3 fatty acids.
As for probiotics, these are especially
important for children born prematurely and
those not breast-fed. The normal bacterial
constituency of the gut is established within
days of birth. Either of the above conditions
will tend to lead to a reduced role for
bifidobacterium, the bacteria which should
be chiefly represented in the intestines
of children. Supplementation with Baby’s
Jarro-Dophilus™ or another quality source of
mixed probiotic bacteria is highly advantageous
and can be started even with newborns.
There is an old adage “an ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure.” In the case of
nutrition and health, this means that starting
off on the right foot in pregnancy and in the
child’s infancy and early years can be crucial
for determining adolescent and adult health.
Fortunately, the rewards are well worth
the effort.
For references sent a SASE to totalhealth.
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