Feeding Your Growing Child

“He ate nothing today.”

He almost certainly did, and he is almost certainly fine.

In the best-known study of how young children eat, researchers weighed every mouthful fifteen two to five year olds took over six days. Meal by meal, their intake varied by around 34%. Across whole days, it varied by around 10%. A large lunch was followed by a small tea, and the reverse.

Judging a child’s eating by one meal is like judging your month’s spending from a single receipt. The receipt is accurate. It tells you almost nothing about the month.

You are probably worrying about how much your child eats. Worry about what they eat instead. Quantity largely looks after itself. Quality does not.

The most common mistake in this age group

Milk. When a toddler refuses dinner, milk is the one thing you can be sure of getting into them, so you give more. Then they are too full for dinner tomorrow, so you give more again.

Milk is an excellent food and an almost useless source of iron. It fills a stomach roughly the size of the child’s fist, its calcium blocks iron absorption from the same meal, and nearly one in ten children aged one to three is iron deficient.

The guide gives you the ceiling, the reasoning and the fix.

And the thing almost nobody teaches

Children do not learn to eat by getting older. They learn by being taught, in small steps, with the right equipment.

This guide follows a Montessori approach and explains it from the beginning for anyone who has never come across it: the prepared environment, real glass instead of plastic, a jug they can lift, and the knife progression that takes a child from a spreader at one to a sharp knife at six. A three-year-old can quarter their own grapes. Most parents have never been shown that they can.

What is inside

58 pages. Nineteen chapters. Summary box at the top of each one, the reasoning underneath.

The guide follows the principles of Weston A. Price, the dentist who spent the 1930s studying communities still eating their traditional diets, and uses the Weston A. Price Foundation’s own amounts wherever it gives them.

1. Why they “ate nothing today” and are completely fine.
2. How much they actually need, by age, and portions sized to their own hand.
3. Milk, done correctly. Which milk, how much, and why too much causes iron deficiency.
4. The fat-soluble vitamins: A, D and K2. Price’s central finding, and the biochemistry behind it.
5. The nutrients that decide growth. Iron, calcium, iodine, omega-3 and zinc, with the numbers.
6. Supplements for young children, and why vitamin D runs short in a sunny country.
7. The foods Price prized: liver, egg yolks, fish eggs, butter and cod liver oil, in amounts children will eat.
8. Teaching them to eat. The Montessori method, the kit, and the knife progression.
9. You decide what, when and where. They decide whether and how much.
10. Fussy eating, and why it peaks between two and six.
11. Thirty plants, adapted for small hands.
12. Bone broth and gelatin.
13. Fermented foods, including a sauerkraut recipe children can make.
14. Grains, soaking and sprouting.
15. What to leave out. The displacing foods of modern commerce.
16. Sugar, salt and the snacking problem.
17. Choking, and teaching them to cut it themselves.
18. School, lunchboxes and after-school.
19. Cooking with them. Tasks by age, plus recipes from the Carbon IV library.

And the toolkit

Every number the calculator produces is also printed as a lookup table, so it works in full on paper.

Who wrote this

I’m Eloy Rodriguez. I run Carbon IV, a performance nutrition and strength coaching practice in Dubai, and I feed my own children this way.

This is the guide I would hand a parent who is anxious at every mealtime and has been told to relax without being told what to actually do instead.

Questions

Is this a weight or diet guide for children?

No. There is no weight management content and the only body measurements are height and weight. Height over time is the measure that tells you whether a child is being fed enough.

I have never heard of Montessori.

Chapter 8 assumes exactly that and teaches it from the beginning, including what to buy and how to demonstrate. If your child is seven or ten and has never done any of it, you start at the same first step and they move through it faster.

My child is two. Is any of this too early?

No. The guide starts at two, and the calculator uses the equation built specifically for that age. The choking chapter is written for exactly this stage.

What format is it?

Two PDFs and a web-based calculator. Download the PDFs to any device. The calculator opens in a browser on any phone, with nothing to install and no account.

Do I have to follow all of it?

No. Read the summary boxes and you have the protocol. Chapters 3, 7, 8 and 17 are the ones I would read in full, and chapter 17, on choking, is the one nobody should skip.

Feed them well, and teach them to do it themselves.

Those are the two jobs of this stage, and almost every parent is given help with neither.

For general education. Does not replace individual medical advice. If you have any concern about your child’s growth, eating, development or health, please see a doctor.