The article reflects the emotional journey of the author and his family as they navigate the complexities of infant nutrition and malnutrition. At just ten and a half months, the author’s daughter was labeled as 'wasted' by UNICEF, indicating a severe form of malnutrition. Despite parental efforts to increase her caloric intake with high-fat foods, her weight remained a concern even as she thrived visually and developmentally. The narrative highlights the disparity between clinical metrics and real-world health indicators, emphasizing the nuanced understanding of nutrition and child growth.
When my daughter was ten and a half months old, she qualified as 'wasted,' which UNICEF describes as 'the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.' My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure.
Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula.
Although slow to hands-and-knees crawling—scooting was her preferred means of locomotion—she was hitting most of her other milestones. She was also growing longer and longer, shooting from the twelfth percentile at birth to the thirty-sixth at ten months.
In 'Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us' (Avery), Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, recounts facing a similar conundrum.
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