Are you regularly faced with parents worried that their toddler isn’t eating enough? Or are you concerned about toddlers being moved on to family foods, when the family diet consists mainly of convenience foods that may be low in key nutrients and high in sugar, fat and salt? The Infant & Toddler Forum has today launched a new online resource, the Tot It Up food calculator, to help healthcare professionals (HCPs) and parents assess and monitor toddlers’ nutritional intake and identify where and how improvements can be made.
A recent Infant & Toddler Forum poll* showed that UK families are increasingly relying on convenience foods at meal times, and that there is general confusion, and anxiety, about what constitutes a healthy, balanced diet for toddlers. The survey revealed that 31% of mothers described routinely feeling ‘tense, anxious, frustrated or upset’ at their toddler’s mealtimes and 80% didn’t know their toddler should have a low sugar diet.
Good eating habits learnt in the first few years of life may help prevent lifestyle diseases of middle and old age such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers.
Using Tot It Up healthcare professionals can help parents to adopt a healthy lifestyle for their toddler by:
1. Encouraging greater awareness of a balanced diet for toddlers
2. Encouraging a positive, reassuring approach towards healthy eating
3. Encouraging active play
1. Encouraging greater awareness of a balanced diet for toddlers
Toddlers need a balanced diet to help keep them fit and well, and to ensure they receive all the nutrients that are essential for health, growth and development. Providing a balanced diet involves combining foods from the five different food groups, Tot It Up calculates the daily intake of foods from each of the different food groups, and compares it to the recommended number of portions for each , so helping parents to understand how to create a healthy, balanced diet for a toddler.
2. Encouraging a positive and reassuring approach towards healthy eating
A toddler’s appetite can vary from day-to-day and therefore healthcare professionals and parents should consider intake of all the different food groups eaten over a week and not be overly concerned with certain times when toddlers may eat poorly. Tot It Up makes this simple by assessing a weekly intake of all foods.
3. Encouraging active play
Parents may need help with active play that can be substituted for sedentary behaviour, such as watching TV. Tot It Up includes a physical activity function, so parents can record their toddler’s activity levels and compare this to the current recommendations of sixty minutes per day. Parents can then be encouraged to join in with their toddler and see how active their toddler should be throughout the day.
Professor Atul Singhal, honorary consultant paediatrician at the Institute of Child Health in London and Chair of the Infant & Toddler Forum comments:
“Young children need nutritious food for their rapid growth and development, but have good and bad days when it comes to eating. Parents can become too focussed on what their toddler is consuming at each meal and may not realise that it’s important to consider the balance of foods eaten over the week. Tot It Up, allows parents to see how their toddler’s diet compares to current recommendations. It may help to remove the stress from mealtimes, help parents feel more comfortable and relaxed in feeding their toddlers, and encourage a healthy, balanced toddler diet.”
Practising health visitor Dipti Aistrop concluded:
“Current government guidance suggests that children should eat ‘family foods’ once weaned. But if the family diet is not nutritious, then toddlers will be missing out on the nutrients they need from their meals. Tot It Up can assess if there is an excess of high fat/high sugar foods compared to the more nutritious foods and is an excellent resource to help facilitate dialogue between HCPs and parents around healthy diet, eating habits and lifestyle habits.”
In order to refresh your own knowledge of what toddlers should be eating visit www.infantandtoddlerforum.org where you will also find information on how Tot It Up can help you work with parents to assess their toddler’s diet and a link to the Little People’s Plates website for parents where the calculator and other useful materials for parents can be found.
Notes to editors:
* All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from OnePoll. Total sample size was 1000 mothers with a child aged 9-36 months. Fieldwork was undertaken between 6th - 13th February 2009. The poll was carried out online. The figures are unweighted.
Infant & Toddler Forum
Set up in 2005, the Infant & Toddler Forum (I&TF) brings together a multi-disciplinary team of eight experts and practitioners who share a common professional interest in infant and child health, growth and nutrition.
The primary goal of the Forum is to improve the access of healthcare professionals to reliable, evidence-based nutritional information relevant to their practice, so that they can advise and support the parents of infants and young children (from birth to 3 years).
For the first time in 2009, the I&TF has broadened its reach to communicate directly with parents via the Little People’s Plates initiative.
Little People’s Plates
Little People’s Plates is a new education initiative aimed at parents and carers of children from one to three years that seeks to highlight the importance of the correct nutrition this age group needs. Its objective is to provide parents and carers with practical tips, plus evidence-based guidance to help them to make the right food choices for their toddlers whether food is home cooked or pre-prepared. Little People’s Plates is driven by the Infant & Toddler Forum (I&TF), an independent team of specialists in child nutrition and development.
The Infant & Toddler Forum and Little People’s Plates are supported by an educational grant from the Danone Group. The views and outputs of the Forum, however, remain independent of Danone and its commercial interests.