Who needs more Calories?

Question

Who needs more Calories, relatively (i.e. number of Calories per kg of body weight) – a healthy 2 year old child or a healthy 30 year old adult? Why?

Answer 1

A 2 year-old should NEVER eat the same amount of calories that an adult does. A toddler's stomach is only about the size of their fist. They still need to eat heatlhy snacks a couple of times a day, but at age 2 the fat content needs to be cut back. A child over the age of two needs to be cut back from whole fat milk to 2, 1% or skim because after that extra fat is not needed for brain development.

Answer 2

Obviously the adult because he or she is LARGER. There are more muscles which need calories to do the work of movement. Remember, all calories are is energy, and in this case you're basically asking, what requires more gas (energy), a motorcycle (the child) or an SUV (the adult).

Of course this depends on health but let's assume that both are healthy. The most calories are probably needed by full grown adults just after puberty, say, 18-25 year olds because they are fully grown, and their muscle mass and metabolism is typically at a maximum. Everyone is different, though.

Answer 3

Well it depends on where you place value. A healthy baby will consume more calories and use the energy to grow and develop, a healthy 30 year old will use the same energy to sustain there body and repair damage inflected to it. So a baby can burn more calories then the adult but that's due to it metabolism. The adult will burn less then the baby unless they have boosted there metabolic rate by exercising and or doing some short of activity.