Nutritional Challenges in Adolescent Girl

Adolescents are in the process of establishing responsibility for their own health-related behaviors, including diet. It is an appropriate time for health promotion behavior. 

Adolescents can and should take responsibility for their nutrition and the long-term repercussions on health. This may be quite a challenge, considering that adolescents tend to be little concerned with the future, and long-term consequences of their present behaviors, but relevant strategies exist, based on an appropriate knowledge of personal and environmental determinants of food choice in this age group. A transitional period between childhood and adulthood, adolescence provides an opportunity to prepare for a healthy productive and reproductive life, and to prevent the onset of nutrition-related chronic diseases in adult life, while addressing adolescence-specific nutrition issues and possibly also correcting some nutritional problems originating in the past. Preparing for the demands of childbearing and breastfeeding is timely in adolescent girls and, above all, preventing premature pregnancy and its associated risk for both mother and child. 

Early intervention is particularly critical in adolescent girls whose nutritional status is marginal to begin with, so that they enter their first pregnancy in a better nutritional state. Improving adolescent girls’ nutrition has the following reproduction-related benefits:

• Increased pre-pregnancy weight and body stores of nutrients, thus contributing to improved future pregnancy and lactation outcome, while preserving the mother’s nutritional status and well-being;

•  Improved iron status with reduced risk of anaemia in pregnancy, low birth weight, maternal morbidity and mortality, and with enhanced work productivity and perhaps linear growth;

•   Improved folate status, with reduced risk of neural tube defects in the newborn and megaloblastic anaemia in pregnancy.

PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE