why do children seem to be able to eat almost anything and stay relatively healthy compared to adults?

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Obviously children suffer from poor nutrition too, they become obese, they can be malnourished and what not.

And yet to be it looks like often they are more “resistant” to bed food. They eat too much in one sitting? No stomach ache. They eat horribly for months? Blood test would still give decent results. They don’t eat vegetables and fruits? Still no problems pooing.

What makes them so flexible and robust in their diet?

In: Biology

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

1. All their metabolism and health doesn’t have any long term negative effects really going on, especially the type of shit that can’t be stopped really. Your body just slows down as you get older

2. Kids are growing and it takes a lot of energy. It’s pretty much like a body builder bulking. You have to eat a lot more to gain weight and same applies for growing naturally. You need more food for your size than you would otherwise

3. Kids burn so many calories. For starters they run for like multiple hours a day. They are always running around and playing. Even when they are doing regular things they do it with more energy. Kids are moving and fidgeting all the time and might make a little game out of something. We’ve all seen the kids doing like monster stomp walking or jumping down the side walk. These are all little things on their own but when they are CONSTANTLY happening it adds up a ton.

4. In combination with the earlier parts, when your body is burning a lot of calories consistently and needing a lot of calories to grow, it basically gets used to this trend and makes your metabolism go faster so that it can process more energy. This means that even if they go a day every now and then without much excersize or while they are napping, their body is still functioning at this rate. Their body is like this is how much energy we normally use so make sure we keep making that much energy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

One thing that’s important to understand is that insulin resistance develops over time.

If you’re a kid and you eat a bunch of sugar, your body will excrete exactly as much insulin as your body needs to block bodyfat from releasing energy, send that sugar to your hungry cells, burn it for energy, get your blood sugar back to normal levels, and go right back to burning bodyfat for fuel. Eating 200 calories of candy feels exactly the same to your body in terms of satiety as eating 200 calories of balanced lunch.

But if you’ve been eating a lot of sugar for a long time your body becomes more resistant to your own insulin. Your body releases too much insulin for the amount of sugar in your blood stream. Your body stops releasing fat and burns the sugar for energy, but there’s still insulin in your blood, so your body can’t access bodyfat for fuel, so you get really really hungry (and often eat more snacks). As an insulin resistant adult, eating 200 calories of candy makes you feel more hungry than if you didn’t eat the candy, so you’ll overeat, whereas 200 calories of balanced food wouldn’t make you feel that way.

Anonymous 0 Comments

First of all, I reject the idea that children never get stomachaches from what they eat. I constantly see kids rolling around moaning that their tummy hurts because they jammed a bunch of junk down their throats like pigs. Often because they do in fact have trouble pooing. Kids are known to walk around barfing all over the place for absolutely no reason.

Kids are more active and more resilient though. They also require more fat and carbohydrates in their diet, because they are growing. While that doesn’t mean that a constant diet of candy and zero vegetables is good for them, it does mean that a lot of “children’s food” is not as bad for them as it would be for an adult.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So far from truth. Not sure where u got this idea. If anything, children get more stomac aches than adults

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are confusing “healthy” and “not fat”. Thin people can still be unhealthy.

But to answer your question simply, kids are constantly building new tissue (growing) and are generally more active than an adult. Anything that leads to a calorie deficit (diet and/or exercise) will lead to someone being thin.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Lots ( not all ) of poor nutrition symptoms take years to develop. And lots of modern food is fortified against the major nutritional deficits that affect people quickly. Eg milk has vitamin D, cereal has iron , kids drinks have added vitamin C.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t and can’t, humans regardless of age will become unwell and or unfit if they eat accordingly. Children often move more and can only get extensive health testing at the convenience of their guardian so they appear healthier

Anonymous 0 Comments

1. They’re growing and need a lot of energy.
2. They absolutely get an upset stomach from eating too much/the wrong things. Vomiting, diarrhea, “tummy ache”…these things all happen frequently
3. Childhood obesity rates and Type 2 diabetes rates are at an all time high

So, by and large, they can get away with it because they are growing and active. But only to a limit.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Calories In > Calories Out

Calories out has a bunch of factors, children especially are growing, uses calories, they tend to be more active, uses calories, they’re forced to be active for schooling (physical education etc). It’s also worth noting that as an ex teacher, a lot of kids with bad eating habits/bad sleeping schedules were the kids who were ill the most. A cold there, falling asleep in class, complaining about insomnia (yeah it’s totally not the redbull you drank at 9pm).

Bodies pretty resilient, the more extended punishment the worse the results, and kids do face consequences for bad habits.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In my experience, I wasn’t healthy but I was assumed to be. I held it together well enough until adulthood, when all the safety nets of childhood were removed, and then my state of poor health became much more obvious. Many chronically ill folks I know had a similar experience of assumed health in childhood and more obvious poor health after the supports of childhood end. Childrens’ first hand experiences are not generally taken into account when recording this kind of information, it is generally the parents’/adult observations.

So I have doubts about the basis of your question. Perhaps children do SEEM well enough, but children don’t know anything other than their own experience and often don’t realize something is wrong in their body bc whatever they experience is their own normal. Parents have a responsibility to check in with their kids to ensure they are well, but from what I have observed most parents are more interested in reassuring themselves their children are fine and healthy than investigating issues that, while minor in childhood, may mess up their child’s adult life if left unaddressed. Not to mention how shite doctors often are at recognizing illness developing in young people, so. I’d need a lot of hard data we can’t get to believe in the basis for this query.