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Nutrition for Infants, Children, and Adolescents Essay

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Nutrition for Infants, Children, and Adolescents
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Each child is a unique individual whose heredity and environment shape the course of his or her life. Woven into the daily life are aspects of food and nutrition. What childhood memories of food do you have? Are these memories healthy or unhealthy? Foods and their nutrients are essential to life. In the beginning years of life an infant’s nutritional health depends on the family unit. Parents must have knowledge of the changing food needs of the child and must also have sufficient resources to provide food, shelter, and clothing for the family. Equally important, parents create the cultural and psychological environment that influences the …show more content…

The respiratory system undergoes major changes as the newborn’s lungs fill with air during the first breath, and gas exchange across the pulmonary circulation abruptly replaces placental transfer.

Similarly, birth triggers a major transformation in nutritional pathways and metabolism of the newborn. At a time when nutritional needs are high (per unit body weight higher than at any other time after birth) the newborn must abruptly begin to swallow, digest, and absorb a variety of complex proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. No longer are readily available simple substrates provided by the mother via the placenta. The newborn begins to convert substrates-protein to glucose, glucose to fat, and must adapt to a discontinuous supply of nutrients. Glycogen stored during feedings must be converted to glucose to support energy needs between feedings. Adding further to the vulnerability of the newborn period, many of the digestive and absorptive functions of the newborn are incompletely developed (Schmitz, 1991).

To ease the transition through this turbulent period, the newborn needs to be provided with easily digestible and bioavailable nutrition in the form of breast milk or infant formula. The infant depends on a diet of closely regulated composition and does not achieve nutritional independence until weaning.

Here I will focus on the physical growth

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