Feeding Your Picky Eater

I sometimes wonder how some children manage to get enough energy to keep them going and going. If your youngster is one of the many who pick and choose the foods they like most, he or she may often get on food jags, eating the same foods for all meals or even refusing food altogether. In my house this week, my 5-year-old is refusing to eat anything but noodles and bread! But I'm not too worried about this new phase; experts suggest it's normal and may not last too long. In fact, in most cases like this, children are getting all the nutrients they need despite their limited intake.

As children grow, their needs start to change. The rapid growth they experienced in the first couple of years of life starts to slow and they require less food. Between birth and age 2, babies will as much as quadruple their weight, but then they will gain only a few pounds a year between the ages of 2 and 5.

Toddlers and preschoolers are asserting their new-found control when they play with toys instead of sitting at a table, or eat only the same foods meal after meal. It's OK to allow your child to assert a certain level of independence.

Still, there are ways you can keep your child's nutrition on track. Remember to avoid offering snacks too close to mealtimes. (There really was some merit in your mom's telling you this would ruin your appetite!) And don't allow your child to fill up on juice and milk at mealtime. One way to achieve this is to limit fluids offered at the table until after the meal has been eaten.

If you are concerned that your child's menu is too limited, keep in mind that you are his or her role model. If you don't eat green vegetables, it's likely that your child won't eat them either. Lately, I've found that my son has developed an interest in what the people around him are eating. During a recent trip to a restaurant he ate the entire serving of broccoli off my plate and has been obsessed with vegetables ever since!

Finally, if you want to introduce new foods to your child, be realistic. It takes many introductions of a new item until it is accepted and familiar. Start by offering only small samples, but make sure that you try repeatedly and don't give up if it's refused on your first try.

If you're also dealing with a picky eater, it's usually not worth all the battles to get your child to eat what you've planned for him or her -- and you may find yourself making the same threats your parents made when you were young. I know that in my house we may be trading some vegetables for dessert in the near future.

Exercise in youth has lasting bone benefits

Men who participate in athletics in their late teens experience bone-building benefits that last for years, even if they are no longer training intensively, a new study shows.

Osteoporosis or brittle bone disease is most common among women, but also occurs in men, with the incidence expected to triple over the next fifty years, Dr. Anna Nordstrom and colleagues from Umea University in Sweden note in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Physical activity is known to help build bone mineral density (BMD), which reduces the likelihood of fractures in later life. While people achieve peak BMD after reaching puberty, they add, there is evidence that exercise has the greatest bone-building effect during childhood and early puberty.

Questions also remain about whether the benefits of early-life exercise for bone strength persist if a person stops training.

To investigate, the researchers followed 63 athletes and 27 non-athlete 'controls', whose average age was 17 at the study's outset, for nearly 8 years.

At the beginning of the study, all the athletes -- who were either ice hockey or badminton players -- were actively training for an average of about 9 hours a week, with workouts including soccer, long distance running, weight training and other activities. They had been training for an average of 10 years previously, and had a greater average BMD than the controls.

Twenty-seven months into the study, the athletes showed increases in BMD compared to the control group. At the second follow up, at 68 months after the study's outset, 27 of the athletes had stopped active training, and showed greater BMD loss than their counterparts who remained active. By the third follow up, at 94 months, an additional 13 athletes had stopped training. This group lost more BMD than either the controls or the athletes who were still active.

However, at the last follow-up, the men who began the study as active athletes still had higher BMD measurements than the control group, even if they were no longer training.

Most importantly, these gains were retained in the hip area, where fractures in later life can be particularly crippling, the researchers write.

The gains seen among even the athletes who stopped training would be enough to reduce future fracture risk by 50%, Nordstrom and her team estimate. "These results may suggest that a high peak BMD resulting from previous training may reduce the risk of osteoporotic fractures in men," they conclude.