My child often skips meals and then drinks milk to compensate. Is this nutritionally adequate? How should the family feed the child milk? Should we use nut milk? (Hai Ha, 34 years old, Hanoi).
Reply:
Milk is a food that contains many different nutrients with 3 energy components: sugar, protein, fat, in addition to water, vitamins and minerals, other trace elements, including calcium for bones. Milk is easy to swallow in liquid form, easy to digest and absorb in the body, helps increase height, so milk is very important for children.
For children under 6 months old, milk is the only and complete source of nutrition. For children who are eating solid foods and older, milk is still necessary but requires a large amount of energy and nutrients from solid foods to be complete. Milk only plays a certain role in the daily diet of older children. If children only drink milk to survive, they are at risk of lacking energy, being underweight, leading to susceptibility to bacterial and viral infections, and being susceptible to iron deficiency, anemia causing paleness, fatigue, lack of concentration, irritability...
Families should feed their children food and milk to supplement calcium. Photo: Freepik
If your child occasionally skips meals or eats poorly due to illness, parents can use milk to make up for the missing meals. If your child skips meals completely and only drinks milk, he or she must drink a large amount of milk to equal the amount of solid food and this method cannot be maintained for a long time. For example, a small bowl of 250 ml porridge cooked with enough nutrients will provide about 300-350 kcal, a bowl of white rice is 200 kcal, while 250 ml of milk only provides 160-180 kcal.
Therefore, if a child skips a meal, the family needs to find out the cause to fix it. The child may have some disease, mouth ulcers that cause pain when eating, fever, fatigue, coughing and vomiting a lot, or the food that meal was not prepared to suit the child's chewing ability; taste, too salty or smelly, sour...
If the interval between meals is less than 2 hours and the child still feels full, parents should wait until the child is hungry before feeding. Parents should coax the child to eat more cakes, eggs, potatoes, yogurt after meals, then compensate with milk. Or the family should wait 2 hours after meals, put milk in the snack and eat with cakes to balance nutrition. If the child refuses to eat for a long time, the family should take the child to see a doctor to find out the cause and treat promptly.
At the same time, parents need to develop eating behaviors for children instead of just caring about whether they are full or hungry. For example, parents should let children eat with adults to practice eating and choosing food, and avoid letting children eat while watching TV or cartoon videos...
Families should not completely cut milk out of their daily meals so that their children have to eat food. Children need at least 500 ml per day for all ages over 6 months. Other dairy products such as yogurt, cheese, flan (caramel), and cream can also replace a portion of milk equivalent in volume.
Children over 1 year old can use pasteurized or sterilized fresh milk (cow or goat milk), whole milk powder. Whole milk helps children under 6 years old get enough nutrients and fat for brain development. Children over 6 years old can use low-fat or skimmed milk to prevent overweight and obesity in children at risk of gaining weight too quickly due to drinking too much milk.
Regarding nut milk, some types have protein, sugar, and fat content similar to cow's milk, but the calcium content is often low. Nut milk is only used as a nutritional supplement, not to grow a child. It must be drunk alternately with cow's milk to avoid calcium deficiency and slow growth in children.
MD.CKI Dao Thi Yen Thuy
Head of Department of Dietetics,
Tam Anh General Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City
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