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Division of GI and Nutrition, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Main Building, Room 7414, 324 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, E-mail: mascarenhas{at}email.chop.edu
The Handbook of Pediatric Nutrition is a well-written, practical book intended for professions that provide nutritional care for infants, children, and adolescents. The book is comprehensive and targeted mainly toward dietitians, but other medical professionals who are involved in the nutritional care of patients will find it very useful. "Handbook" is misleading because the book is a large, detailed text rather than a handbook that can be carried around. The book is divided into 2 sections: normal pediatric nutrition, and growth and therapeutic pediatric nutrition. The first section deals with basic aspects of pediatric nutrition, including normal growth, nutrition assessment, nutrition for premature infants through adolescence, sports nutrition, community nutrition, vegetarianism, food hypersensitivity, obesity, and eating disorders. The second section deals with disease- and organ-specific topics, including pulmonary disease, gastrointestinal disorders, renal disease, inborn errors of metabolism, developmental disabilities, AIDS, oncology and bone marrow transplantation, burns, enteral nutrition, parenteral nutrition, diabetes, and cardiac disease.
The book provides practical information about a variety of common topics, including some unusual and novel topics such as botanicals and nutritional counseling. Some chapters are extremely well written, such as those on food hypersensitivity, nutrition assessment, community nutrition, diabetes mellitus, and pulmonary diseases. Other chapters contain various practical information about breast-feeding, infant feeding, vegetarianism, sports nutrition, and feeding disorders. Wherever appropriate, the authors have included information about alternative and complementary medicine. In addition to a reference list, some of the chapters provide useful resource lists and suggested reading lists. The comprehensive appendix consists of a variety of growth charts, nomograms, arm anthropometric tables, laboratory values, and nutrient requirements, including dietary reference intakes and recommended dietary allowances, the food guide pyramid, and conversion tables. The well-designed table of contents and index will allow readers to readily find charts and topics of interest. An increasingly important topic in the care of pediatric patients is bone health and disease, which is not covered in this text. Additionally, the topics of food drug interactions and newer components of formulas (eg, fructooligosaccharides and short-chain fatty acids) could have been more comprehensively covered in the chapter on enteral nutrition.
In summary, the Handbook of Pediatric Nutrition is a well-written book of practical issues in pediatric clinical nutrition specifically relating to patient care. Although the book is targeted toward pediatric practitioners, especially dietitians, other providers who take care of this population will find this book a good resource. The editors are to be congratulated on this effort.