Feeding Children

Some Topics

The Unique Child

In theory, all children should be treated equally, but all children are not created equally. Nourishing food has to interact with each person’s unique metabolism and reactivity. Many things can go wrong. Abnormal food-body interactions change the rules of nutrition. A cheese sandwich may be nourishing to one child and a toxic mix for another. A chocolate bar with peanuts may please one child and send another to the hospital in an ambulance. Daily milk or bread ingestion may be suitable for one child and cause chronic disease in another.

The premise of the Alpha Nutrition Program is that each child will have a best fit of safe, nourishing foods and nutrient supplements that permit a long and healthy life. Your best fit diet is likely to be different from other people’s best fit. Even close relatives will be different.

Two parents with three children should have five different diets to suit the individual needs of each unique individual. The idea of a “normal diet” suitable for the whole family is flawed. A better idea is that a small selection of best foods may serve the needs of the whole family, but beyond this “core diet” individual differences will become all important in the determination of who does well, who does poorly, and who develops a disease.

Biologists understand that the distribution of observable characteristic follow the distribution of genes in an in any given population. A "normal distribution" of any measured characteristic is a bell-shaped curve, with most scores in the middle range and a few at each end, or "tail," of the distribution.

The main idea is that all human characteristics are distributed and, no matter what human feature you are considering, you will find some individuals with more and some with less. When you accumulate sufficient data and do the appropriate statistics, you will have an idea about the distribution of the feature and an indirect understanding of the genetic and environmental determinants of that feature.