Abstract

NAZARETH, Margarida; REGO, Carla; LOPES, Carla  and  PINTO, Elisabete. Nutritional Recommendations for Paediatric Ages: State of the Art. Acta Port Nutr [online]. 2016, n.7, pp.18-33. ISSN 2183-5985.  https://doi.org/10.21011/apn.2016.0705.

Introduction: Dietary intake must supply nutritional requirements and its adequacy is crucial for a healthy growth and development during infancy and adolescence. There are no Portuguese nutritional guidelines and, consequently, there is no consensus about what should be used in Portugal. Objectives: To systematize and to compare the nutritional guidelines for childhood and adolescence (0-18 years) and to contribute for the adoption of guidelines to be used among Portuguese paediatric population. Methodology: The most used in children and adolescence, based on a PubMed® search of studies published in the last 10 years, were selected: those from the Food and Nutrition Board / Institute of Medicine, National Academies (USA/Canada), from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations / World Health Organization (Worldwide) and from the European Food Safety Authority / European Commission (European). Subsequently, all documents concerning these nutritional guidelines were assessed. Results: The three considered committees provide different criteria, namely in the age stratification that they use for presenting the respective guidelines and in the used terminology. The European Food Safety Authority / European Commission guidelines are targeted for European population and are based on a solid methodology, comprising guidelines of the other two committees, being also the most recent, whereas the Food and Nutrition Board / Institute of Medicine, National Academies guidelines are the most used. The recommendations for energy, protein and lipids do not evidence significant variations between committees. Concerning carbohydrates, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations / World Health Organization recommendations are the highest. With regard to vitamins and minerals, in general the recommendations for vitamin B1, pantothenic acid, calcium, selenium, zinc and iodine are similar between the three committees, but they showed some variations for the remaining vitamins and minerals. Conclusions: The official adoption of nutritional recommendations for the Portuguese population is important and urgent, and would allow to uniform criteria and to compare results. The methodological consistency and the up-to-date of the European Food Safety Authority / European Commissionrecommendations lead the authors to consider them as an option to recommend.

Keywords : Adolescents; Children; Nutritional recommendations.

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