What to do if your child is malnourished

As living conditions improve, parents become more and more indulgent toward their children and satisfy all their demands in life. As a result, many children develop bad habits of being picky eaters. Many parents would say that it doesn’t matter, let the child eat whatever he likes. In fact, picky eating habits can cause malnutrition in children, and a balanced diet is beneficial to the child’s health.

In the diet, a combination of meat and vegetables and eating more fruits and vegetables can effectively prevent symptoms of malnutrition. Food is rich in various amino acids and trace elements, which are essential nutrients for normal life activities of the human body. If any one element is lacking, it will cause malnutrition in children. In most cases, chronic inadequate food intake is the primary cause of malnutrition.

There are many causes of malnutrition:

1. Long-term insufficient food intake, such as insufficient breast milk and failure to add complementary foods early; for those who are bottle-fed, the quality and quantity of food cannot meet the needs, such as excessive dilution of milk, or feeding with only starchy foods; sudden weaning, the baby cannot adapt to the new food, etc.

2. Bad eating habits, such as irregular eating, picky eating, rumination habits or nervous vomiting, etc.

3. Disease factors

Disease affects appetite, hinders the digestion, absorption and utilization of food, and increases the body's consumption. Common diseases that may cause malnutrition include persistent infantile diarrhea, chronic enteritis or dysentery, and absorption caused by various enzyme deficiencies. Adverse syndrome, intestinal parasitic diseases, tuberculosis, measles, recurrent respiratory tract infections, chronic urinary tract infections, certain congenital malformations of the digestive tract (such as cleft lip, cleft palate, congenital hypertrophic pyloric stenosis or cardia relaxation, etc.) and severe congenital heart disease can all cause feeding difficulties: certain hereditary metabolic disorders and immunodeficiency diseases can also affect the digestion, absorption and utilization of food.

During pregnancy, premature birth and twins can easily cause malnutrition, and some gynecological diseases such as intrauterine infection, maternal illness or malnutrition, abnormal placenta and umbilical cord structure and function can lead to fetal malnutrition and intrauterine growth retardation, which becomes a prerequisite for infant malnutrition. To avoid malnutrition in children, diet is very important and prevention is even more critical.