Milk is an important source of nutrition for children because its content is rich in calcium, vitamin D, and good protein. Starting at the age of one year, children are allowed to start drinking cow's milk. However, what kind of milk is good for your little one? The following tips for choosing milk for children over one year.
Types of milk for children
In addition to breastfeeding, one year old children may also be given cow's milk as a supplement. This is because the digestive system of one-year-old children is able to digest various contents contained in cow's milk.
Cow's milk is the most consumed milk, and contains various vitamins and important nutrients, such as vitamin D, calcium, sodium, niacin, and protein.
There are various types of cow milk available on the market, such as skim milk, low fat milk (low fat), and full cream milk. Of all types of cow's milk has a different fat content.
Here is the amount of fat each type of milk has:
- Skim milk: 0.5 percent fat or about less than 2 grams of fat
- Low-fat milk: 1-2 percent fat or about 2.5-4.5 grams of fat
- Full cream milk: 3.25 percent fat or about 8 grams of fat
What type of cow's milk is best for children?
If you look at the fat content, maybe you as a parent would prefer to give skim milk or low fat, because most parents consider fat not good.
In fact, fat is not always bad, especially for children.
Fat is a nutrient that is important in the development of your child. Fat is needed to build body tissues, including the nervous system and hormonal control. So, don't let your child lack fat intake.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), children of up to two years of age should not be given low-fat milk. However, if children aged 1-2 years are obese, then giving low-fat milk can be done.
The more fat content in milk, the higher the content of omega-3 fatty acids in milk. Omega-3 fatty acids are very beneficial for the health of your heart and brain.
A study that reported that drinking milk with high omega-3 fatty acids was 44 percent less likely to have diabetes.
Therefore, full cream milk can be a good choice of milk for children aged one year and above.
Apart from the fat content, full cream milk also has a higher nutrient and calcium content, which is good for growing your child's bones.
How to choose full cream milk that is good for children
Full cream milk is the best choice of milk for children aged one year and above. Therefore, you should choose a practical package, and it is also safe for children because it has passed the UHT process.
UHT is the process of producing milk using high-heating technology to kill microorganisms in milk. However, this heating process will not change the nutritional content of milk, because it has used processing technology called high temperature short time (HTST).
HTST is a method of short heating with a temperature of 140-145 degrees Celsius for 4 seconds which is capable of killing harmful microorganisms while maintaining the nutritional content in milk.
The heated milk is then immediately put into the container, to avoid contamination of bacteria that can enter from outside.