Nutrition Through the Life Cycle

Last semester I took a nutrition class at BYU for fun.  The topic of the class was the specific nutritional needs and concerns at specific life stages: infants, toddlers and young children, adolescents, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, and older adults (we skipped middle-aged people because that what is usually covered in most of the other regular nutrition classes).

I learned how to do a nutritional analysis on a pregnant person and preschooler and determine suggestions for improvement.  It was really fun and I learned a lot.  To do the analysis I got a "24-hour recall" (everything that person ate yesterday in 24 hours) and input the info into the USDA choosemyplate.gov's Supertracker.  The Supertracker tool will make reports based on the info you put in.  My teacher wanted us to look at the meal summary (to see overall trends), nutrients distribution report, and the food groups and calories report.  I really like the Supertracker tool; the choosemyplate.gov website has a lot of great information about nutrition among other health/wellness objectives.

My favorite aspect of the class was that we didn't just talk about what the nutritional needs are but we also discussed how you could help someone actually meet their nutritional needs in any of the life stages, e.g. "picky" eating or disruptive behavior during meal times in young children, nausea during pregnancy, and chewing or swallowing difficulty in older adults.  

My goal is to post on each of the life stages we covered in class, with the most relevant ones for my blog readers first--so toddlers and young children, pregnancy, old people (I love you mom and dad), and then the others.