Dietary management of acute diarrhea: A scientific basis

With the discovery of oral rehydration therapy, mortality in acute diarrhea due to dehydration has decreased. But the nutritional effect of diarrhea in turn makes the child more vulnerable to other infectious diseases, including severe episodes of diarrhea. This remains an important hindrance towards improved child health especially in the developing countries. It is now essential to focus more attention on the nutritional aspect of diarrhea rather than rehydration alone. In 1924 Park advocated the nutritional benefit of the child rather than the frequency of the stool as being more important [1]. The same was elegantly shown by Chung and his co-workers in 1948 [2]. Recently, the value of this concept has been amply rediscovered both in the developed and the developing countries [3–5]. However, the main principles for the treatment of diarrhea in the west as well as in many of the developing countries are still rehydration and the modification or withholding of the pre-diarrheal diet along with a variable period of starvation. All these are aimed at reducing the malabsorption of nutrients and thereby inducing early recovery from diarrhea.