Children and Vitamins: A Healthy Start for the New School Year

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Few people fully understand the relationship between the growing needs of children and vitamins. Parent and grandparents, aunts and uncles and even child minders and babysitters should all fully understand how they can give a child a healthy start for the new school year by understanding their nutritional needs.

Many people who have responsibility for children do not understand the nutritional needs of themselves, let alone the children for whom they are responsible. Let’s have a look at children and how they are different from adults in their needs. First they need love. If a child is loved, experts have agreed that they tend to eat better and get more of their nutritional needs naturally.

There are many children who are loved, but who do not get fed properly for financial or social reasons. It is frequently accepted that to feed children on what they want to is a way of loving them, by giving in to their demands. In fact this is false: the old proverb is true, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, which means that if you teach children how to eat properly when they are young, then it will save a lot heartache and problems later in life. Perhaps a novel use of the proverb, but it is true nevertheless.

Adults should determine a child’s diet, not the child. Irrespective of what any parent will tell you, all children will eat what they are given to eat unless the adult makes a fuss. Young children will also want to eat what their parents or siblings are eating. The need for a vitamin supplement in a child is determined by its diet.

Vitamins are vital to life. They let us see the world; they allow children to get off their bottoms and stand; they allow children to grow, but not just grow – to grow big and grow healthy. Without vitamins children will not develop properly. Do you realize that you, as an adult, can go without a number of vitamins or minerals for days with no ill effects, but that growing children cannot go even one day without a proper supply of certain vitamins?

Perhaps you should find out how important vitamins are to you, yourself, and then you will maybe understand how important they are to your growing son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter. If you go without vitamins for an extended period then you will feel a bit off color, and a bit tired at first. You will find it a bit hard to concentrate on anything, and perhaps you will get a cold or sore throat. After a while you will be able to take vitamin and mineral supplements and begin to feel better. Your colds will be come less frequent, you will start to get your old energy back and reading a book will become less of a chore.

A child however, especially a young child whose body and nervous system is still developing, will not experience these symptoms. Instead, their nervous system will slow down dramatically; their bones will stop growing through a lack of calcium; they will become anemic through a lack of iron, and suffer from many other undesirable symptoms that might be irreversible. All vitamins are essential, but what you should keep in mind that no child should need a supplement if given a good balance diet including plenty fruit and vegetables.

Allowing a child a diet of burgers and chips, however, is bordering on neglect and your child will almost certainly need a mild vitamin supplement. Calcium and iron are essential minerals, and a good supply of vitamins is also needed for healthy growth. What is lost during the formation of the body cannot be made up once the body is fully grown. There is no recovery for a child with stunted growth through malnutrition.

Fortunately such problems are rare, but a child’s development is intimately connected with its nutrition during growth, in the same way that a plant in poor soil will not grow as healthy as one in good well fertilized soil. Nutrition is essential for proper development. The human body is an organism that relies on a good chemical balance within it, and if any of these essential chemicals is missing, then the chemical reactions needed for the organism to function as it is designed to do cannot take place.

You must provide these missing chemicals. If you do that in the right way the body can resume working as it should. However, once the body has been full developed, and growth ceases, there is little that can be done to make up for deficiencies. That is why good nutrition is essential during the growing years of a child when its body is developing.

Children can be picky eaters and still get the minimum known nutritional requirements. However, is the minimum enough? Many foods today are processed in a way that destroys much of the nutritional value and modern agricultural methods on depleted soil results in food that looks real, but is tasteless and has little nutritional value other than that needed for the fruit or vegetable itself to survive.

In such an environment is it not wise to ensure that our children receive the vitamins and minerals essential for their healthy development through supplementation? If you research the supplements needed for children of certain age groups you will be able to provide these supplements confident in the knowledge that you are doing good, and what you are giving cannot do damage.

For that is the crux. If the supplements cannot damage the growing child, then they are insurance against poor diets. Poor diets not necessarily through poor feeding, but through poor agricultural practices and modern food processing the techniques that destroy much of the nutritional value of foodstuffs which cause children to need supplements.

We all like to think that we are doing the best for our children, but many of us are, quite unwittingly, letting them down. We allow them to eat poor diets of pizzas and burgers, and when they do eat so called nutritional foods they have been over-processed with little content of the water soluble vitamins or those that are destroyed by over-cooking.

Perhaps we should all find out more about the nutritional needs of our children and grandchildren, and of those that we are responsible for in schools and nurseries. There is a huge amount of misinformation, ignorance and just sheer indifference that can harm our children more than we appreciate. Were we aware of these nutritional deficiencies then we would all be more aware of the vitamins and minerals that children need for their proper development.

We should make sure that we understand the needs of growing children and vitamins play a large part in that. There are multivitamin and mineral supplements available for children, and we should use them where appropriate, under medical supervision if necessary.

~HealthCrazed.com

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