Pediatric Nutrition Handbook

Abstract

This comprehensive handbook is geared primarily to physicians involved in infant and child health care, in recognition that most medical schools and hospital teaching centers give insufficient attention to nutrition as an integral part of health care. There are 38 chapters, covering basic nutrition, assessment of nutritional status, nutritional needs and feeding of infants and young children, availability of community nutrition services and food assistance programs, and clinical applications. The last section covers a wide variety of common clinical problems, as well as some that are relatively rare. Finally, there are several chapters grouped as Miscellaneous Topics. This section includes nutritional aspects of vegetarianism, health foods and fad diets, megavitamin therapy, nutrition and athletic performance, and food additives. Included also are chapters on infection, immune mechanisms, and the relationship between iron nutritional status and incidence of infection in infancy (which might just as well have been incorporated into the section