Nutrition News

Nearly half of parents of children with Down syndrome reported giving or having given dietary supplements to their children to improve health and intellectual outcomes, according to a recently published study results in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Amy Saxe-Custack

Approximately one-third of all children and teenagers use dietary supplements, including multivitamins, researchers said. Additionally, the use of alternative medicines, such as melatonin supplements for insomnia, has nearly doubled.

Breast-feeding allows the infant microbiome to develop in a healthy manner and may protect infants from developing overweight in the future.

Infectious Diseases in Children asked David L. Katz, MD, MPH, director of Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, and founder of True Health Initiative, whether the current obesity prevention methods, including promoting physical activity, eating less fast food and taxing surgary drinks, will reduce the current rate of obesity. Can these methods work for a child who is already obese, and are new large-scale methods needed to address the current rate?

Despite childhood obesity and overweight being recognized as a public health crisis more than a decade ago, with intensive efforts devoted to addressing it, national survey data show increases in prevalence of overweight and obesity in every age category between 1999 and 2016.

Infants and toddlers are consuming large amounts of added sugar, with toddlers aged between 19 and 23 months consuming 7.1 tsp of sugar on any given day, according to research presented at Nutrition 2018.

Obesity is a prevalent condition experienced by Americans, with the CDC reporting obesity in 36.5% of adults and 12.7 million children and adolescents between the ages of 2 and 19 years.

Children and adults with type 1 diabetes mellitus who consumed a very low-carbohydrate diet had exceptional glycemic control of their disease and very few adverse events, according to recently published study results in Pediatrics.

Although rates of sports drink consumption among adolescents decreased overall between 2010 and 2015, those who watched more than 2 hours of television daily increased their rates of drinking sports beverages.