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Towards appropriate feeding to prevent malnutrition in infants and toddlers

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 72, pages 1274–1281 (2018)Cite this article

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It was not low fertility rates—but rather high mortality rates prior to reproductive age—that kept demographic growth in check for our species, Homo sapiens, whose numbers in the 21st century are approaching 7.6 billion. During the previous hundreds of millennia, when Homo erectus was the most advanced primate, their total numbers were only in the hundreds of thousands with extinction as a constant threat.

The two major imperatives in the Animal Kingdom are feeding and reproducing. These have also been the scenarios for mortality risk throughout human evolution, with issues related to the former predominating. For the hunter-gatherer, the dangers of the hunt itself decimated the clans’ males, while toxic elements in foraged plants and parasites in uncooked game, as well as early dental deterioration from chewing roots and sinews, constituted additional factors for the population as a whole. With the advent of fire, up to a million years ago, cooking sanitized and softened food, improving some of the aforementioned issues. Food-borne intestinal infections probably date to prehistory and had been the most frequent cause of mortality in most of the world until the relatively recent advent of antibiotics and rehydration therapy. For humankind, eating must be seen as a “necessary evil” due to the multiple threats it has entailed from prehistory to the present.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Studies of Sensory Impairment, Aging and Metabolism (CeSSIAM), Guatemala City, Guatemala

    Noel W. Solomons & Marieke Vossenaar

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  1. Noel W. Solomons
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  2. Marieke Vossenaar
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Correspondence to Marieke Vossenaar.

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Solomons, N.W., Vossenaar, M. Towards appropriate feeding to prevent malnutrition in infants and toddlers. Eur J Clin Nutr 72, 1274–1281 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-018-0266-z

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