Food Safety | @Parents, have you fallen into the "nutrition trap"? It is important to understand nutrition labels

As we all know, milk contains a lot of calcium, which can help the body's bone development. Recently, a two-year-old child from a neighbor's family went to the hospital for treatment because of slow growth. After multiple examinations, the doctor found that the child was malnourished. The main reason for malnutrition was that the parents used milk drinks as the child's main food source, which delayed the child's growth.

In fact, parents can judge whether food meets the nutritional requirements for growth and development by checking food labels. By comparing the nutritional labels of milk drinks and formula milk, we can find that the energy contained in every 100 ml of milk drinks is 161 kilojoules, which is only about 70% of the formula, and the protein 1.0 gram is only about 30% of the formula, and many kinds of drinks do not have calcium content marked. Not all drinks with the word "milk" are real milk. These synthetic milk drinks are also considered drinks and are not very helpful for children's growth and development. Although they contain some traces of milk, most of them are artificial blending products. Children need a lot of nutrition for growth and development, so milk drinks cannot be used as formula milk or milk substitutes.

There are more and more children's foods on the market now, so there may be many parents who fall into the "nutrition trap", so we must learn to read nutrition labels. The food ingredient list marks all the ingredients added to this food, and arranges them in order from high to low, which also provides us with important nutritional information. For example, the ingredients in dairy drinks are often marked with whole milk powder, water, sucrose and various food additives, while the ingredient list of pure milk is only raw milk. The difference between the two is obvious at a glance. You can also use the nutrition label to determine whether this food can meet the child's special nutritional needs. For example, when adding rice noodles to babies, it is recommended to choose iron-fortified rice noodles. In addition to marking "high iron" and "iron fortified" on the food packaging, you can also choose by comparing the iron content indicated on the nutrition labels of various rice noodles.

In addition, if there is a baby with allergies at home, parents must make sure that the ingredient list does not contain any allergenic foods when choosing food for their children.

If we want to be good nutritional guardians of our children, we need to understand more nutrition knowledge, accumulate experience through continuous practice, and regularly monitor children's growth to verify whether their nutritional intake is reasonable.

Expert interviewed: Zhu Bingquan, deputy chief physician of the Department of Child Health, Children's Hospital Affiliated to Zhejiang University School of Medicine