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Chapter 25 — Further Reading
⚠️ This chapter covers seven life stages, so this page is organized by stage. Read the section for the stage you're in or responsible for; ignore the rest until you need it.
⚠️ Start with your own country's guidance
Because this is the chapter where national guidance differs most, and differs for good reasons.
Folic acid doses and risk categories, vitamin D recommendations for infants and older adults, iron screening in pregnancy, complementary feeding ages, and fish species advice in pregnancy ⚠️ all vary between jurisdictions.
Look for: your national maternal and infant nutrition guidance · paediatric feeding guidance · older adult nutrition and malnutrition screening pathways. ⚠️ These are free, written for practitioners, and more current than any textbook.
Pregnancy and lactation
Search "folic acid neural tube defect prevention trial" for the foundational randomized evidence, and ⚠️ "folic acid fortification neural tube defect population reduction" for what happened when countries fortified. The population data is the more persuasive half.
On choline: search "choline requirements pregnancy neurodevelopment intake adequacy." ⚠️ Then read the label of an actual prenatal supplement. The gap between the literature and the product is the point of §25.2.
On fish and mercury: your national fish advice in pregnancy — ⚠️ species-specific and worth reading rather than summarizing, because "eat fish" and "avoid these fish" are both correct.
On gestational weight gain: search "gestational weight gain guidelines by pre-pregnancy BMI." ⚠️ A clinician conversation, not a self-directed one.
On lactation: search "energy requirements lactation" and "iodine requirements lactation." ⚠️ The numbers surprise people, and the topic is genuinely under-covered.
Infant feeding — and how to read this literature
The PROBIT trial — search "PROBIT breastfeeding promotion cluster randomized Belarus." ⚠️ This is the strongest causal evidence available and it is more modest than most advocacy suggests and more positive than most contrarianism suggests.
On confounding: search "breastfeeding sibling comparison long term outcomes." ⚠️ The sibling-pair studies are the ones that separate breastfeeding from family background, and reading one will permanently change how you read observational infant-feeding claims.
⚠️ And read something written from the other side of this — search for work on the psychological impact of infant feeding pressure, and first-person accounts of insufficient supply. The research tells you effect sizes; it does not tell you what the pressure feels like at 3am, and §25.4 exists because both matter.
On formula safety and preparation: your national guidance. ⚠️ Short, practical, and the dilution warning matters.
⚠️ Allergen introduction
Du Toit G et al., the LEAP trial — New England Journal of Medicine, 2015. Search "LEAP trial early peanut introduction." ⚠️ Read it, and then read your country's CURRENT infant feeding advice to check it has been updated. Chapter 28 goes further.
⚠️ And treat this as the worked example for Chapter 17's three-year reminder. Guidance reversed on good evidence within a decade, and the people following the old version were never told.
Feeding children
Ellyn Satter's work on the division of responsibility — ellynsatterinstitute.org ⚠️ and her
books. Widely endorsed, practical, and the framework Case Study 1 is built on.
On the evidence for what backfires: search "parental feeding practices pressure restriction child eating" and "restriction increases desire palatable food children." ⚠️ This literature is largely observational and remarkably consistent.
On neophobia and repeated exposure: search "repeated exposure vegetable acceptance children number of exposures." ⚠️ The exposure counts in the literature are higher than most parents attempt.
On weight talk: search "parent weight talk adolescent disordered eating" and the work of Dianne Neumark-Sztainer (Project EAT). ⚠️ If you are a parent, this is the one to read.
Adolescence
On peak bone mass: search "peak bone mass accrual adolescence determinants." ⚠️ The timing finding is what makes §25.10b work.
On adolescent athletes: ⚠️ the IOC RED-S consensus material (Chapter 23's further reading) includes adolescent-specific content, and it is the document to read if you coach young athletes.
On adolescent iron: Chapter 14's references, with attention to menstruating adolescents.
⚠️ The menopause transition
Because this is the section where I most want you to go past the chapter.
Search "menopause body composition visceral fat longitudinal SWAN" — ⚠️ the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation is the major longitudinal cohort here and it is the source of the age-versus-menopause distinction in §25.10.
On bone: search "bone loss rate perimenopause postmenopause" and your national osteoporosis society's guidance.
On MHT: ⚠️ read a current menopause society guideline rather than anything written about the Women's Health Initiative in the 2000s. The risk-benefit picture has been substantially revised, the original findings were widely over-generalized to women they didn't apply to, and a generation was advised on the basis of that over-generalization.
⚠️ This is also, incidentally, one of the clearest examples in medicine of Chapter 17's stale-guidance problem operating at population scale.
On phytoestrogens: search "soy isoflavones vasomotor symptoms meta-analysis." ⚠️ Read it expecting modest and mixed, because that's what it is.
Older adults — the most important section here
On protein: search "PROT-AGE study group protein older adults" and "ESPEN guideline protein older persons." ⚠️ These are the expert-group documents behind §25.13's figures, they disagree slightly, and reading two of them is more honest than reading one.
On sarcopenia: search "EWGSOP2 sarcopenia definition diagnosis" — ⚠️ the European consensus definition, which is where grip strength and chair-stand testing come from.
On resistance training in the very old: ⚠️ search for the trials in nursing home residents and in people over 85. They are more striking than most people expect and they are the best argument in this chapter.
On malnutrition screening: MUST (bapen.org.uk, free) and the Mini Nutritional Assessment
(MNA). ⚠️ Both are one page and take minutes.
On the anorexia of ageing: search "anorexia of ageing determinants" and ⚠️ "eating alone food intake older adults" — the social-eating literature is larger and more convincing than you'd guess.
On dysphagia: ⚠️ the IDDSI framework (iddsi.org, free) for standardized texture levels, and
your national speech and language therapy guidance. If you care for someone who coughs at meals, read
this today.
A note on what to be careful with
⚠️ This chapter has three distinct failure modes because it covers three vulnerable populations.
1. ⚠️ With children: doing something. §25.6's whole finding is that the intuitive interventions backfire. If you finish this chapter energized to manage a child's eating more actively, you have taken the wrong lesson. The intervention is to do less, neutrally, repeatedly.
2. ⚠️ With pregnancy and infant feeding: adding pressure. The evidence in §25.2 and §25.4 is real and it is delivered into a context already saturated with guilt. Folic acid and food safety are worth being firm about. Almost nothing else on that list is worth making someone feel worse over.
3. ⚠️ With older adults: applying the rest of the book. §25.12 inverts and the inversion is counter-intuitive after twenty-four chapters of moderation. If a recommendation in Chapters 4, 18, 22 or 24 feels obviously right for an 80-year-old, check §25.12 before giving it.
And the thing I'd most want retained:
⚠️ Two questions — "how are your teeth?" and "what medications were added this year?" — outperform every piece of dietary advice in the older-adult section. Neither is nutrition. Both take thirty seconds. Almost nobody asks them.