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An unbalanced diet is a bad habit of intake, including the following three situations:

• They do not like to eat a few kinds of food that the average children like, and the situation lasts for a long period of time.
• They particularly like to eat certain foods and refuse to eat if such foods are not served.
• They particularly don't like certain foods, and feel disgusted when they see them, which affects their eating of other foods.

Causes

If you just don't like to eat a certain kind of food, it is not an unbalanced diet. You must dislike a category of foods, such as vegetable or fish. The causes of children's unbalanced diet are as follows:

• Non-staple food is added at the wrong time and children are not well adapted to solid food.
• Children are affected by caregivers' eating habits.
• Failed eating experience: such as choking by fish bones or burns by hot soup, resulting in children’s food refusal.
• Do not take away children's appetite for personal preferences, give them whatever they want to eat.
• Frequently eating snacks: Frequent eating of snacks can lead to continuous secretion of gastrointestinal digestive fluid and loss of appetite.
• Parental overindulgence and children’s attention seeking.
• Lack of concentration on eating: Prolonged meal time causes indigestion, decreased appetite, and anorexia.
• The diet is monotonous and the cooking unpalatable.
• Bad dining atmosphere: Children are nervous when eating and thus lack appetite, which induces unbalanced diets.
• Grown-ups do not have correct nutritional knowledge.
• Overcorrection or forced eating.

Ways to improve unbalanced diets

To improve children's unbalanced diets, we must first understand the reasons, in order to solve the problem.

• Teach children to form regular living habits and develop good eating habits.
• Eat set amounts of food at regular times, and avoid eating snacks.
• Respect food and reduce food waste.
• Chew slowly, but eat for no more than 30 minutes.
• Keep a pleasant dining atmosphere, and don't exercise intensely before and after meals.
• Dispel misconceptions and don't criticize the food.
• Diversified food appearance and food variety.
• Change the cooking methods by adding seasonings.
• Don't rely too much on fast food.
• Improve the environment and atmosphere of eating: for example, eating with other children.
• Instead of coercing and luring, encourage and persuade young children to eat.

Conclusions

• In order to grow normally, children in their growing period need sufficient calories, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, fibers and water.
• After entering the early childhood, the growth rate tends to ease compared with the infant period, while various physiological functions, intelligence and cognition are gradually developing, and the child also begins to learn independently. Facing these changes which are different from the infant period, nutrition intake is certainly the most important thing for young children to grow healthy and strong.
• Although unbalanced diets will not have any effect in the initial stage, in the long run it will lead to physical dysfunction, malnutrition or overnutrition because of the lack of certain nutrition, which will certainly affect the health and development of the body.