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When it comes to the growth and development of children, nutrition plays a crucial role, especially in terms of promoting optimal height. By providing the right vitamins and minerals and incorporating the best dietary sources into their meals, you can ensure your child receives the nutrition they need to grow up tall and strong. Below, you will find essential information on the most important nutrients and the best food sources to support your child's height growth. So, let's dive in and unlock the secrets to promoting optimal height through proper nutrition!
The importance of nutritional care to children's height growth
Children need to be sufficiently supplemented with energy, nutrients and necessary catalysts to control cellular differentiation, increase sizes and number of cells, thereby facilitating physical development.
However, if children suffer from nutritional deficiencies for a long time, they will grow slowly or even lead to weight loss, malnutrition, diseases and short stature. Besides, nutritional excess and diets focused on a certain nutrient (such as protein) also adversely affect structures and functions of cells, which results in obesity and increases the risks of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension or hypotension, etc. As a result, children suffer many health problems and their height growth is severely hindered.
Nutrition also plays a vital role in children's height growth.
If an infant is reared and cared properly, he/she will grow steadily as follows:
Under the age of 3: At birth, children's average height is about 49-50 cm. At the age of 1, their height is 75 cm which is 1.5 times higher than at birth. In the next two years, children will grow 10 cm/year if they are well-nourished.
Puberty: Puberty occurs in female between the ages of 10-16 and in male between the ages of 12-18. During puberty, in 1-2 years, children's height will increase from 8 to 15 cm per year if they are well-nourished. In fact, we cannot determine exactly which year it is. Therefore, it is important to ensure good nutrition for children during puberty in order that they can obtain optimal height.
Post-puberty: Children's height still increases but the growth rate is very slow. The total height increase of the following years is not equal to the growth spurt of one year of puberty. Most of the growth plates of people after the age of 20 will be closed. Once the growth plates are closed, it is impossible to grow taller.
If children do not meet the above height criteria, it is possible that the nutritional regimen that is currently applied is not really appropriate for them. At that time, parents need to make research to build a scientific and proper nutritional regimen to facilitate children's physical development.
How to supplement children with nutrients to help them get their desired height
- Providing necessary nutrients for the height growth properly and sufficiently
For optimal height growth, children need to be provided with necessary nutrients such as calcium, collagen type II, vitamins, etc. However, the content is not enough to both ensure the organs to work effectively and facilitate the height growth. Therefore, parents should supplement children with a variety of nutrients and give proper attention to above nutrients to enhance their chances of owning an ideal height in future.
In order to facilitate children's height growth, you need to pay attention nutritional supplementation.
- Setting up proper eating schedules
For children, we cannot maintain 3 meals a day as adults but we need to build a proper and appropriate eating schedule for them. The number of meals and the interval between meals depend on children's ages. Generally, in addition to three main meals, children should eat 2-3 snacks per day with milk, cookies, fruits, etc. The interval between meals should be about 3 hours. Furthermore, the time for each meal should last less than 30 minutes to ensure that in the next meal, children already feel hungry and can eat more.
- Monitoring children's growth regularly
In fact, not all children receiving good nutritional care can thrive. Many children suffer from malabsorption syndrome, which causes the majority of nutrient intakes to be eliminated and leads to stunting, slow growing, and short stature. Therefore, along with the proper nutritional supplementation, parents need to monitor children's height and weight regularly. Parents should check children's weight and height monthly and compare with the data of the previous months to monitor their growth rate. If parents find that children have signs of malabsorption, they should quickly take children to the hospital for examination, diagnosis and timely remedies.
The height growth is influenced by many factors. Therefore, in addition to nutritional supplementation, parents have to encourage children to exercise more, sleep early and sleep sufficiently to facilitate their height growth and help them stay healthy.
