Infant Nutritional Needs - How To Take Care Of Nutritional Needs For Infants?

Submitted by Loring A. Windblad on March 5, 2010

Nutritional Guidelines For Taking Care Of Infants

Infant nutrition is extremely important as it is a building block for lifelong health and well-being. Sufficient nutrition during infancy is highly critical in order to achieve optimum growth, development and maturation. Infants must be solely fed on breast milk for the first six months of life and from then on must receive nutritionally competent and additional baby foods to meet their increasing nutritional demands.

Some Important Points To Consider:

Ensure your infant gets adequate iron little children between the ages of one and three require at least 500 milligrams of calcium every day after the age of three, include dietary fiber in the food in order to prevent health troubles later on in life do not feed your infant foods such as eggs, citruses and fresh fruit juices, as well as honey until after the 12 months of his life do not feed your child fish, groundnuts or any kind of dried fruit or nut before the ages of two or three

Your infant's nutritional requirement is dependent on the energy and activity needed for metabolic growth. Nutrition is also determined by the infant's size and rate of growth. During the first year of life, the calorie needs per pound of body weight are higher than at any other time.

Due to the varying differences among infants, a variety of suggested calorie consumptions have been developed by health organizations. Breast milk or formula feeding is enough to offer adequate calories during the first four to six months of life. Assessing the weight and length of the infant, and planning a diet on a standardized growth program, can establish the quantity and quality of an infant's calorie consumption.

Breast milk is the only food recommended for a baby to get the necessary vitamins and minerals, so will an iron-modified formula, in the absence of breast milk.

Some medical experts believe that infants who live in northern urban areas need Vitamin D, so do infants who are dark-complexioned, or those babies kept wrapped up in the house due to cultural behavior.

Every professional organization and medical experts believe that infant feeding through breast milk is a must and hence highly recommended. Even though feeding breast milk is without doubt or question crucial for infants born in less developed areas, the advantages of breastfeeding are significant in developed countries likewise.

In less developed countries, breastfeeding cuts down infant death rate and ailments.

Research reveals that breast milk is far more nutritionally power packed than fortified baby formula, as breast milk is rich in essential proteins and antibodies that are extremely useful in preventing infection in the infant. Infants who are breastfed have a reduced incidence of lung, intestinal, and ear infections. More importantly, breast feeding induces and supports the bond between the mother and the child.

Medical research also reveals that infants who are breast fed get lesser allergies, and when examined at nineteen months of age they tend to get higher scores on intelligence quizzes.