Week 7 Ilab Nutriton

Week 7 iLab

Nutrition for Adolescence

1. The adolescence lifecycle, the age to be adolescence

Not all teenagers may have the same nutritional requirements. The United States Department of Agriculture provides age ranges on which to base teen nutritional requirements. Teenagers may fall into one of three age brackets: the 9 to 13-year old age bracket, the 14 to 18-year-old age bracket or the 19 to 30-year-old age bracket. As a result, a 13-year-old or 19-year-old may have very different nutritional requirements than their peers who fall into the 14 to 18-year-old age bracket. Nutritional needs may also vary by gender (Tythan, 2011).

2. Nutritional challenges associated with adolescence

The World Bank and its partners have been challenged anew to work with countries to tackle un-addressed health and development problems of vulnerable groups. Among these groups, adolescents have been identified as particularly important, and often neglected. There is increasing concern about the negative consequences of malnutrition in adolescent girls and young women for their offspring and themselves. Renewed action to address the nutritional problems and needs of adolescents is therefore a priority.

There are 1.2 billion adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 in developing nations, making up one fifth to one quarter of their populations. While adolescents have typically been considered a low risk group for poor health, this ignores the fact that many health problems later in life can be improved or avoided by adopting healthy lifestyle habits in adolescence. There is substantial evidence that inadequate diets affect adolescents’ ability to learn and work at maximum productivity. Under nutrition increases the risk of poor obstetric outcomes for teen mothers and...