Children's Nutritional Scale

The essence of the children's nutrition scale is "a reference baseline for the nutritional intake of children of different ages." It is neither a feeding KPI that must be accurate, nor a metaphysical standard without reference value. Its core function is to help parents quickly identify nutritional gaps in their daily diet, rather than creating feeding anxiety.

Last week I was at a community child care free clinic and I met a mother squatting on the steps of the corridor wiping her tears. She was holding a child nutrition scale with fluorescent markings in her hand. She said that her 3-year-old baby only drank 230ml of milk yesterday, which was 70ml less than the recommended amount. Will it affect her growth? I took the table and looked at it. She had compiled it herself. Each item was marked with a number accurate to the gram. Even how many grams of broccoli and how many grams of strawberries were eaten every day were listed clearly. It was even more detailed than the dietary assessment forms I usually make.

There is actually no unified "standard answer" for children's nutrition scales currently circulating on the market. The three mainstream categories have their own audiences: One is the age-specific nutritional intake standards in the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)" issued by the National Health Commission. It is also the most commonly recommended version by domestic child care doctors, adapting to the dietary structure and genetic characteristics of domestic children. points; the second category is the international general nutritional intake standards for children released by the WHO, which are suitable for children in different regions around the world, and have a wider range of values; the other category is the local standards issued by pediatric associations in Europe, the United States, Japan and other regions. For example, the Japanese scale will place more emphasis on the intake of deep-sea fish, while the European and American scales will appropriately reduce the recommended proportion of refined carbohydrates. Precisely because there are so many versions, there are a lot of controversies: some parents feel that the domestic scale has too high a proportion of carbohydrates, which makes it easy to raise obese children; some parents say that the European and American standards are not suitable for yellow people's physiques, and their children will always feel hungry after eating, and both parties will argue. In fact, there is no need - the baselines of different versions are originally adjusted according to the average dietary structure of the local population. Just choose the official version where you usually live, and there is no need to worry about which one is more "high-end".

I have been doing children’s nutrition consultation for almost 6 years. I have seen people who use the scale clearly, and I have also seen people who are stuck by the scale. The most exaggerated parent used a jewelry scale to weigh even the salt when cooking for her child, accurate to 0.1 gram. If the child ate an extra bite of potato chips, she had to count on the scale for half an hour, and how much staple food and how much vegetables had to be reduced to make up for it. As a result, the child became anorexic as soon as he turned 4 years old, and his growth curve dropped directly from 50% to 15%. Of course, it does not mean that the looser the scale, the better. Many conservative pediatricians I have contacted will require children with special physiques such as premature birth, allergies, and delayed growth and development to try to meet the daily recommended intake. The metabolism and absorption capabilities of such children are inherently weaker than ordinary children, and any deviation may affect their development. At this time, the accuracy of the scale is very important.

Last year, a mother came to me and said that her 4-year-old baby always cried out that she was tired and would gasp after running even two steps. She went to the hospital to find out that there was no organic problem. I asked her to record her diet for three days on a scale. In the end, she found that the red meat intake was only 1/3 of the recommended amount, which was an obvious iron deficiency. After she returned, she fed her baby lean beef three times a week, plus pork liver once every half month. When she checked again within two months, the hemoglobin returned to the normal range, and the baby loved to run and jump. You see, if the scale is used correctly, it is a very worry-free troubleshooting tool, and there is no need to treat it as a scourge.

If you really find it troublesome to calculate the number of grams per day, there is actually a "lazy person's method" commonly used in the industry. You don't need to calculate the daily value, just look at the weekly average - for example, the baby doesn't like to eat vegetables in the first three days of this week, and he will make up for it by giving two extra bites in the next four days. A difference of dozens of calories really has no impact. Even simpler is the "fist rule": the daily staple food is two fists the size of the baby's own, two fists of vegetables, one fruit, one protein (meat, eggs, beans), and enough milk of 300-500ml, you can basically hit the baseline of the scale, which is much less worrying than counting grams every day. Oh, by the way, there is another detail that many people don’t know. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in many regions will adjust the local recommended intake. For example, coastal cities will appropriately lower the recommended intake of seafood, while inland cities will raise it a bit. If you live in these places, you can also go to the local CDC official website to find a more suitable version.

To be honest, every time I meet a parent who treats the scale as an imperial edict, I have to give a few words of advice. Raising children is not a chemical experiment. How can everything be accurate to the gram? As long as the baby's growth curve is stable within the normal range of 3%-97%, has sufficient energy, does not get sick often, and occasionally eats two more pieces of candy and drinks two less sips of milk, there is really no need to be anxious about the scale. After all, the scale is just a tool, and how to use it depends on your child's actual situation.