Vol. 11, Special Issue 9 (2022)

Author(s):
Pallavi Kumari, Jyotirmayee Sahoo, Debjani Das and Dr. Usha Singh

Abstract:
Nutrition is a science of foods, nutrients and other substances, their action, interaction and balance in relation to health and disease. Young children are typically referred to an infant in the first year of age. Infants and young children require some amount of nutrition to meet out their daily physiological and metabolical functions. Up to the age of 6 months, nutrient requirement is fulfilled by mother’s milk alone. After that their requirements are increasing, thus breast-milk alone is insufficient to meet their energy needs. To meet out the nutritional requirement and to get rid of different forms of malnutrition, complementary foods need to be included in the diet of infants and young children. Complementary feeding is defined as the provision of food or fluids to infants in addition to breast-milk. Timely introduction of appropriate complementary foods is important to meet the full nutritional and psychological needs of infants and young children. Infants need complementary foods with much higher nutrient density than is required for adult diets. Keeping all these points in view the present investigation had been planned with the objective to develop low-cost complementary food for the infants and young children from locally available foods. From the findings of low cost complementary food it can be concluded that ready-to-mix commercial products will be highly nutrient rich which will help for improving infant and young child feeding.