NUTRITIONAL REQUIREMENTS IN EARLY LIFE

Abstract

IN ACCEPTING the Borden Award I must say how deeply I appreciate this honor. One's efforts in the realm of science tend to have a somewhat jaundiced look in retrospect, but when someone else thinks they have merit it is very heartening. I have chosen the nutritional requirements of children for my topic, if only to show how little we know about it and how important it is to know more. Why is it important to study nutritional requirements today? Isn't it true that infant feeding is a dead subject? Can't we feed a child today in a hundred different ways and have it thrive? That is certainly true of the normal subject in our own country. Food shortage is no problem. The problem of digestibility has been solved by a variety of processing techniques. We can supply the necessary nutrients with a wide margin of safety. We have no difficulty in meeting caloric and protein requirements, and vitamin deficiencies are almost a thing of the past. Why should we worry all out nutrition? The answer is, however, not hard to find. We may have mastered the problem of nutrition in health, but we have scarcely touched the problem of nutrition in disease. In the autopsy room we still see plenty of infants and children who are emaciated as the result of disease. Their nutrition has failed. If it could have been maintained the result might have been different. Disease poses special problems for the nutritionist. It may affect the organs of digestion, assimilation and utilization, and thus limit the quantity of nutrients available to the body. It may impose limitations on particular types of food and, finally, it may impose special nutritive requirements. We are all familiar with the increased caloric demands made by fever and there is evidence, too, of an increased nitrogen requirement at this time. We are familiar, too, with the demineralizing effects of acidosis and with an increasing number of situations in which potassium losses from the cells need to be replaced.