Heard of the phrase “You are what you eat”? No denying, what a person eats gets reflected in his/her overall well-being. If you eat healthily, you can rest assured of staying in the pink of health. But if you keep munching on fast food and high sugar drinks, you are sure to lose your health. Thus, the diet indeed lays the foundation of a healthy body. This particularly holds true in the case of children, as they have a growing body and a developing mind. But what if we tell you that the food that your kids eat also has a significant impact on their behavior, mood, and academic performance?
Yes, that’s right! In fact, each and every nutrient has a specific role to play in our well-being. So today, we, at The Star Global School, ranked among the Top Schools in Rohtak, will shed more light on the topic and help you understand the impact that your child’s diet and nutrition have on his/her health as well as academic performance.
The impact of nutritional deficiencies on the thinking abilities of children
- Iron deficiency in toddlers and younger kids can lead to a decrease in dopamine transmission, which negatively affects the cognitive abilities of the brain. If they don’t get enough iron in their diet, you can even notice behavioral changes in them, like anxiety, heightened emotions, weakened executive functions, etc.
- Mineral and vitamin deficiency (including Thiamine, Iodine, Zinc, Vitamin E, Vitamin B) in kids is associated with low concentration, reasoning, problem-solving, and comprehension. Besides, it also impacts the learning, planning, and abstract thinking abilities of children.
- Other nutritional deficiencies like that of Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Proteins, Zinc, and B Complex Vitamins can severely interfere with your kids’ abilities to understand the world around them. In short, it severely hampers their overall cognitive development, which not only affects their academic performance but also their personal life in many ways.
Effect of high sugar/high sodium/high-fat diet on the health and development of kids
- Research has revealed that foods loaded with high sugars, caffeine, or too much sodium end up leaving kids more tired and unfocused. These kids easily get nervous and tend to fall sick more often. This impacts their overall health, and the effect also shows up in their academic performance.
- Food rich in saturated fat and trans-fat can lead to a decline in cognitive development and directly affects your child’s learning, exploring, and thinking abilities. It also impacts the energy levels, making them mentally absent during the learning and developing process.
- Food and diet high in sugar can interfere with the neurotransmitters and may result in depression, anxiety, and mood swings in children. An excessive increase in sugar level has been shown to interfere with the hippocampus area of the brain. Hippocampus usually plays a vital role in storing and organizing memory and connecting emotions and senses with those memories.
A well-balanced diet is what a child need!
Studies have revealed that be it the deficiencies of vital nutrients in food or the excess of sugar, sodium, and fat in the diet they take – it does have an adverse effect on the overall well-being of children. A disproportionate intake of nutrients and sugar, which is often found to be the case with fast food items, is directly associated with poor academic performance and also with a lot of metabolic diseases in children, such as insulin resistance and obesity.
At The Star Global School, one of the top schools in Rohtak, we understand the impact of an unbalanced diet and inactive lifestyle on the overall health of children, and thus always encourage our students to eat healthy, freshly cooked, and nutrition-rich meals that aid in their growth. Eating habits and food has always been one of the primary growth factors in humans, and we believe that until our eating habits aren’t improved, we will keep lacking in several fronts of life.
Especially in the times when the pandemic has majorly impacted the physical activities of kids and has confined them to their homes, it has become all the more important to pay special attention to what the kids are eating. We, at The Star Global School, would hence like to urge the parents to ensure that kids are taking in healthy meals and snacks comprising natural fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, etc. When they eat healthily, it naturally improves their memory and brain functioning, and thereby helps ensure a healthy body and healthy mind.