Nutrition Science and Everyday Application - beta v 0.1

NUTRITION IN LATER INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD 601
The best way to determine if children are getting enough food to eat is to track their
growth. Pediatricians and other healthcare providers do this by measuring a child’s weight,
length, and head circumference at each check-up and plotting their measurements
periodically on growth charts from the World Health Organization. Growth charts allow you
to compare your child’s growth to a population of other healthy children. Sometimes parents
worry that if their child is in the 15th percentile for weight, that means she’s not growing
well, but this isn’t the case. Children come in different shapes and sizes, and some grow
faster than others. Thus, a child in the 15th percentile for weight may be a bit smaller than
average, but when it comes to body size, the goal is not to be average or above average. The
goal is to grow steadily and predictably in a way that is healthy for that individual child. If a
child who was previously in the 15th percentile was suddenly measured at the 5th percentile
or 50th percentile, that might indicate a health or nutrition problem that warrants further
evaluation. 7