Are nutritionally fortified noodles really useful for children?

There is no way to draw a direct conclusion based on "useful" or "useless". The core depends on whether the product you choose is up to standard and whether it is used correctly. It is essentially a targeted nutritional supplement tool. If you use it correctly, you will get twice the result with half the effort. If you use it wrongly, you will pay an IQ tax.

I met a 2-year-old boy when I was doing popular science on child nutrition in the community. My grandma usually took care of her, but she was always worried that the child would not be able to digest it. She was given white porridge and steamed eggs every time, and rarely red meat. She was found to have mild iron deficiency anemia, and the child was particularly resistant to the rusty smell of iron supplements. I suggested that she choose high-speed infant noodles that comply with GB10769 and cook one meal a day with some chopped green vegetables. After less than three months of review, the hemoglobin returned to the normal range. In this case, do you think it is useless? Definitely not.

But I’ve also seen many parents buy it and be fooled by it, turning around and saying it’s all a gimmick. Last week, a mother came to me to complain. She said that she bought children’s noodles with DHA and probiotics for three times the price, but her baby’s physical condition had not improved after eating it for half a year. I took the package and looked at it, and found that it was based on the food standards of ordinary dried noodles, with only 10 milligrams of DHA added per 100 grams. If the child eats 50 grams of noodles in one meal, the DHA intake is not enough to eat half a mouthful of cod. Will it be useful? Not to mention that many parents regard it as a "universal nutritional meal" and feel that if they eat fortified noodles, they don't need to feed their children meat, eggs, and milk. The added nutrients are not even one-third of the daily requirements, so how can they possibly make up for the nutritional gap.

In fact, it’s easy to understand if you think of it as a “diet patch”. If your child is usually picky about eating, for example, he doesn’t like red meat and is prone to iron deficiency, and he doesn’t like to drink milk and is prone to calcium deficiency. Choosing the corresponding fortified noodles with sufficient nutritional content can indeed help fill part of the gap, and is much more acceptable to children than force-fed supplements. But if your child has a very balanced diet and eats enough grains, potatoes, meat, eggs, vegetables, fruits, and milk every day, then there is really no difference between ordinary noodles and fortified noodles, so there is no need to spend extra money.

By the way, don’t believe those gimmicks that are very expensive after adding “fruit and vegetable powder” or “grain powder”. Many fruit and vegetable powders are added in such a small amount that they can be ignored. It is not as practical as throwing two slices of green vegetables and adding a spoonful of minced meat when cooking noodles.