Nutrition & Malnutrition

Nutrition and malnutrition both play a key part in development and growth of children in the United States and around the world. The best form of nutrition is breast milk for infants. It is best for a infant to only have breast milk and nothing else for the first couple months of their life. The reasoning behind this is because the milk contains all the nutrients that the infant needs, they really do not need anything else. Breast feeding is the most common source of nutrition for infants around the world. During the mid 20th century a lot of mothers thought that formula was better than breastfeeding. Of course both are a healthy form of nutrition for an infant, but breastfeeding is still strongly encouraged. This topic is important to me because I hope to have children one day and I feel it is important to have knowledge about both nutrition and malnutrition. I am focusing my information about nutrition about North Korea, their daily calories is about 2,103, which is much less than the typical American diet which is over 3,000 calories. Whats healthy about their diet is that they divide their calories proportionally amongst all the food groups and they do not have a high obesity rate.

Unfortunately, malnutrition is a big problem that still happens to this day. Protein calorie malnutrition is when, "a person does not consume enough food or sustain normal growth". Protein calorie malnutrition affects about 1/4th of children around the world. In having this it leads to other things like growth stunts which makes the child shorter than they should typically be and wasting which is when the child is very underweight for their weight. Malnutrition is the cause of all these horrible things that happen to young children. There is high malnutrition in Asia and Africa. Because of malnutrition a lot of children die before they become 5 years old. Undernutrition put children at risk for infections, diseases, and deceased quality of life.

What the World Eats. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/what-the-world-eats/

Berger, K. S. (2005). The Developing Person Through Childhood. Macmillan.

Malnutrition. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/