People need to eat and drink constantly. As the saying goes, "Man is made of iron, and food is made of steel. Skipping a meal makes the heart panic." In fact, not eating for a long time can even lead to death. It can be seen that food is the necessary source of energy for human survival.
The movement of matter cannot be separated from energy. Electricity can provide the electrical energy needed for machines to operate, gasoline can provide the thermal energy needed for cars to run, and food can also provide the thermal energy needed for the movement of human tissues and organs. Children also have a special need, which is growth and development. A newborn baby weighs only about 3 kilograms, and will double its weight to reach 6 kilograms in three to five months. After another six months, when the child is one year old, its weight will double again to reach 9 kilograms. By the age of seventeen or eighteen, the weight is similar to that of an adult, about 20 times the weight at birth. At the same time, from just being able to eat, poop, and pee when born, they can do almost nothing else, until they can walk, read, think... From being a consumer who needs care from others, they become workers who can engage in social work. These changes happen gradually over time, and people may not feel them, but when comparing a seventeen or eighteen year old youth with a newborn baby, the magnitude of these changes becomes apparent. The material basis for these changes is energy and nutrients.
Children have a relatively higher need for energy and nutrients. If food is cut off, it is the children who will die first, not the adults. This has been confirmed during the Second World War and the Tangshan earthquake.
Why do people need to eat? It seems not worth discussing, because humans have needed to eat since the beginning of time. This is a natural phenomenon. However, modern children require a healthy body and will engage in more complex social work in the future, so it is necessary to study how to eat well. To study how to eat well, it is necessary to first study why we need to eat, which is the main content of human nutrition.
Nutrition is the basis of health
When it comes to children's health, some people say that a child is healthy if they don't have any diseases. This is not correct. According to the modern scientific definition, health is the dynamic balance between the body, the natural environment, and society.
The dynamic balance of the environment includes physical, mental, and social well-being. There is no intermediate state between health and disease, which is called the third state in medicine. In fact, the majority of children are in this third state to varying degrees. The "third state" is the intermediate zone between health and disease, and it is also the boundary where health and disease transform each other. People often find themselves in this "third state", but in recent years, even decades, people have paid more attention to the improvement of the "third state" and its close relationship with disease prevention and health promotion.
Nutrition is closely related to health. Adequate nutrition can promote health, while malnutrition and nutritional imbalances can cause diseases. Malnutrition often leads to weakened immune function in children, making them susceptible to bacterial infections and reducing their resistance to various infectious diseases. Infections, in turn, affect nutritional function and further impair immune function. Therefore, nutrition status, immune function, and infectious diseases are interrelated and form a vicious cycle. Every year, 4 to 5 million children die from malnutrition worldwide. Nutrition is closely related to human development. Protein-energy malnutrition can lead to stunted growth and low body weight in children. Chinese newborns have a comparable birth weight to developed countries, but after 6 months, their weight curve is significantly lower than that of developed countries. The main reason is the insufficient addition of weaning foods, which is due to inadequate nutrition supply. After the Second World War, the dietary structure of the Japanese people underwent significant changes. For example, comparing the years 1935 and 1970, the average annual meat consumption per person increased from 2.2 kilograms to 13.1 kilograms; egg consumption increased from 2.2 kilograms to 14.9 kilograms; milk and dairy product consumption increased from 12.7 kilograms to 27 kilograms; and edible oil consumption increased from 1.1 kilograms to 9.9 kilograms. With the change in dietary structure, the height of the Japanese people also increased accordingly. In China, two surveys of physical development in nine urban children were conducted in 1975 and 1985, and over the course of ten years, the height increased by about 2 centimeters and the weight increased by about 3 kilograms. The reasons for this are certainly multifaceted, but the main reason is the improvement in dietary structure.
