Nutrition And School

For the children, the first source of nutrition starts forms the mother's milk which is best suited to meet the physiological maturity because of its composition, antimicrobial factors. Researches have shown that mother's milk contains higher quantity of protein, some amount of fat, sodium chloride, calcium, magnesium and certain antibodies and if it can be given to the infant at approximately 180ml/kg/ day, ensures a healthy growth and development of the body and mind of the children. As the child starts growing, additional food supplements along with calcium, iron, phosphorus, zinc and copper are generally added.

Once these preliminaries are managed, children go the school with a fatty Tiffin box, leaving a boastful feeling in the minds of their parents that their child takes healthy diet. Unfortunately, many a times it proves to be fallacious and it is very much likely that they make very poor choice in terms of balanced diet. The child either, takes over diet and becomes obese or under diet to become a victim of malnutrition.

In most schools, there is a provision of cafeteria for the children and it supplies highly rich foods with a general tendency that more accelerated growth of children needs more enriched food and in this misnomer, they tend to cross the limit of food balance or food restriction habit of the child. A cautionary note should be taken in terms of fat and cholesterol presence in the food. The second important finding is that mostly the fiber content in the child's food is negligible, increasing a chance of mal absorption problem.

Otherwise, cafeteria is a better and healthier choice than taking food from out side vendor who, mainly sells munch food, chips or low quality soft drinks.

Tiffin box, carried from home also imposes some implications as some of the working parents are too busy to give proper attention to the healthy liking of the child and the child passively carries the hostile food for onward distribution amongst his or friend circles.

Various educational bodies are of the unanimous opinion that if a moderate improvement can be done in the food supplement for the children a tremendous improvement, in terms of physiological and psychological status can be expected, the nagging and perennial problem that springs up like dyslexia (difficulty in reading) or acalculia (inability to perform calculation) can dramatically be reduced and radiant smile can be brought back on the anxious face of the child.

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