Feeding Children by Stephen Gislason MD is an essential guide for parents:

If  infants and children are not doing well when conditions are favorable, we think first about problems in their food supply. They develop problems even with regular foods and need carefully chosen foods and sometimes need nutritional help with  low allergy, complete nutrition formulas. 

There are many ways for food problems to interfere with a child's normal functioning and to promote disease. Several problems interact in a complex manner to produce the symptoms and dysfunction that we seek to remedy.

Parents usually believe that the food supplied by the supermarket, restaurants and fast food outlets is ”normal,” convenient and easy to feed to children. Normal is not normal, however. The apparent convenience of all this “normal” food may conceal years of illness, brain dysfunction and unnecessary suffering.

Children’s food tends to be the most processed and chemically contrived of any age group. Food manufacturers and vendors advertise their synthetic, processed foods directly to youngsters, and generally succeed in marketing their products. Boxed, canned and bottled foods, fast foods, snack foods, candies, chocolate bars, burgers, pizzas, and pop are usually included in the diets of our adolescents and many of our younger children.

Since there are multiple effects following ingestion of food, no explanation of food-related problems based on one mechanism alone will ever account for the multiplicity of effects reported and observed. Our best theories assume complex interactions; simultaneous immunological, physiological, and biochemical mechanisms.

When something goes wrong with a child, it makes good sense to look at the flow of substances through the mouth for the source of the problem. We need to look not only at the composition of the food, but also, and more importantly, at the interaction of the ingested materials with the child’s body. Adverse reactions to food are common and produce disturbances by a variety of mechanisms.

Download Feeding Children as a PDF file.