JAKARTA – A teenage girl who is malnourished and anemic for a long time because she continues to be left alone can have a bad impact on the child she gives birth to later, one of which is a lower IQ.
“He will produce offspring whose brain development is lower, disrupted as a result of lower IQ (10 points). When this child goes to school he has weak cognitive,” said nutrition expert from the University of Indonesia, Dr Rita Ramayulis, DCN, MKes in a press conference online, reported by Antara, Saturday.
Rita, who serves as Chair of the Indonesia Sport Nutricionist Association (ISNA), said another problem that could also arise is the low growth of children’s body mass which causes their immune work capacity to decrease.
As a result, he cannot be productive, gets tired easily, has limited movement and others, followed by metabolic conditions that lead to non-communicable diseases (PTM), one of which is diabetes.
“If teenagers don’t change immediately, they will give birth to a stunting generation. Then the stunting generation is very easy to experience metabolic disorders, getting diabetes early,” said Rita.
Stunting is a condition of failure to grow and develop since the first 1000 days of birth (HPK). This condition is generally diagnosed when a child is 2 years old, when 70 percent of his brain is developing. The potential for stunting can actually be seen in the first 1000 days of a child’s journey, one of which is if he is born with low weight (bblr). In this condition, monitoring such as body length and weight is carried out every week.
Rita said that the nutritional problems of adolescents, one of which contributed to the incidence of stunting, could be changed through the application of a healthy lifestyle, including the intake of balanced nutritious foods.
“So, if a teenager is in good nutritional status, it means that when one day she becomes a mother, she is not malnourished. Whenever she gets pregnant, the nutrients in her body are ready to be passed on to her fetus,” he said.
Rita emphasized that balanced nutritious food does not have to be expensive. A series of relatively pocket-friendly foods such as katuk leaves, kale, mackerel, tempeh, fruits such as papaya can be an option to fulfill one’s nutritional intake, but still have to pay attention to proper processing.
“Easy to find tempeh can be used to fulfill protein requirements for children, pregnant women and nursing mothers with proper processing. Vegetables don’t have to be expensive, kale is much better as long as it’s processed properly. Even oncom is due to its extraordinary nutritional content,” he said. said Rita.
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