doing the right thing food options for your children can be difficult, especially if you’re not sure what’s healthy or unhealthy For their develpment.
This can be especially intimidating when you think about the importance of your Stages of development and the role that diet can play in these periods of growth, not only with physical development but also mental and behavioral.
According to a 2020 report published in The Lancet: Child and Adolescent Health, the absolute The worst kind of food for your child’s brain is junk food.
Read on to learn more about the report’s findings, and for more healthy eating tips, be sure to check out 68 “healthy” foods that are terrible for you.
Three brain and nutrition researchers at Western University in London, Ontario reviewed more than 100 different studies for this report. The studies, which included some of the researchers’ own previous work, investigated how poor diet choices can affect children and adolescent brains.
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The report found that children and adolescents consume extremely large amounts of high calorie junk food, which negatively impacts their brain development.
This is largely because the adolescent brain is still developing its prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for memoryattention and impulse control.
According to the study, the effect of junk food on a developing prefrontal cortex may negatively affect your child’s ability to “self-regulate“Your food options.
This report also emphasizes that due to the way fast food could affect a child’s ability to control their eating, increased consumption of this food is known to lead to unhealthy food choices in adulthood, which can contribute to obesity later in life.
Not only may it have consequences for impulse control, but a separate cohort study of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology found that poor diet quality in adolescents was also related to higher cases of depression.
And a new study university of ga found that added sugar in childhood can possibly lead to memory impairment in adulthood. However, this study was done on mice, so more research is still needed.
So with all this information, how can you make the necessary changes in your child’s diet to ensure their brains are they in good hands?
TO 2017 review states that a healthy diet for a developing child includes many nutrients such as protein, carbohydrates (unrefined carbohydrates), healthy fats, iron, vitamins A, C and D, and B vitamins.
Today’s medical news suggests foods such as green leafy vegetables, greek yogurt, fatty fish, and eggs as part of a healthy diet for your child’s brain.
