Children's Diet - Carbohydrates

While a dog likes the taste of protein, humans are attracted to the taste of sweet things. This attraction worked well for early man, because most things in nature that are sweet aren't poisonous and are safe to eat.

Fruits and other plant matter consist mainly of carbonates and the sweetness that people attracted to is actually the carbohydrates. This is because our body is using carbohydrates to produce energy.

How much carbohydrates your kids need?

Children and teenagers need more of it because they need energy to allow their bodies to grow and develop.

The two major forms of carbs:

simple sugars (simple carbohydrates), such as fructose, glucose, and lactose, and also found in nutritious whole fruits starches (complex carbohydrates), found in foods such as starchy vegetables, grains, rice, and breads and cereals

Carbohydrates should make up a quarter to one third of each of your child's meals. When you child's eats complex carbohydrates like whole grains, vegetables, beans and lentils, or simpler carbohydrates such as fruit, the body does exactly what it is designed to do: it is digest these food and gradually releases their potential energy. What's the more, all the nutrients that the body needs for digestion and metabolism, are present in those whole foods, and they also contain fiber, a less-digestible type of carbohydrates, which helps keep the digestive system running smoothly.

Modern man has discovered how to take the carbohydrates from plants, extract the sweetness and leave the rest, while it is very bad news for our nutrition. All forms of concentrated sugar - honey and syrup, white sugar,malt, glucose, brown sugar - release sugar into the blood quickly, causing the rapid increase in blood sugar level. If this sugar is not required by your body, it is eventually emerging as fat.

Unlike natural sources of sweetness and carbohydrate, such as fruit, most concentrated forms of sugar are also devoid of vitamins and minerals. If you child eats sugar on a daily basis, it is bad news not only for his or her blood sugar level, but also bad for emotional and mental state.

Carbohydrates are the body's most important source of energy. They are a necessary part of a healthy diet for both kids and adults.

A healthy balanced diet for children over 2 years should include 50% to 60% of the calories consumed coming from carbohydrates. You must to make sure that the majority of carbs kids eat are from good sources and to limit the amount of added sugar in their diet.

White sugar, for an example, has around 90 per cent of its vitamins and minerals removed. Without multivitamins our metabolism becomes inefficient, contributing to poor energy levels and low mood, and poor weight control.


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