Kid Nutrition

19 Pages 4663 Words

out what the water requirements are. Seems sort of simple but surprisingly some people don't know it. Reasons why infants are more susceptible to dehydration? Large body surface area, obviously because they have a higher body content of water and they require more. And again because the kidneys have limited capacity to handle a solid load, it takes more water to basically excrete the solid load. Again, why the infants are more likely get dehydrated? Well because they can’t tell us they are thirsty. I guess they can cry and that’s an indication to us that they are hungry or that they are thirsty, but until a youngster can really vocalize we don't often know. But that’s not too common. We also want to show you that oxidation of food stuffs produces water as an end product. It’s interesting that from fat you get more grams of water than you start with, but with carbohydrates you get less and from protein.
Breast milk or infant formulas provide the majority of fluid requirements. Human milk, 89% of it is water. Oxidation of ingested milk results in approximately 90% of volume available as free water so you often have pediatricians and family wanting to give their children additional water. Well, if there’s a question about their nutrition, if they are certainly borderline, you either let them take more breast milk or more formula because again most of it is water anyway and when the nutrients get metabolized it forms even more water. Energy is provided by food, it is chemical energy obtained after digestion. I don’t know if you remember this, but the unit of measuring energy is joule or the calorie in what a joule is equal to, and the difference between a kilo calorie and the little calorie. It’s the amount of heat energy to raise 1 kg of water 1 degree centigrade. That’s a kilo calorie.
Energy derived from food, you need to know this. What will carbohydrates be worth in calories, fat and protein? It wouldn’t be unusua...