DIETITIANS: A BALANCED UCD DIET VIDEO

Learn the importance of balancing protein intake for individuals with UCD, highlighting how too much or too little can impact health. A dietitian shares guidance on maintaining proper nutrition while managing the condition.

One of the challenges about a UCD is to maintain a healthy, balanced diet while also keeping grams of protein low.

Everybody needs protein for functions in your body.

When you eat protein, it's broken down into smaller pieces called amino acids.

Those amino acids are essential especially for a growing child.

They help to build up muscles and repair tissues.

If at UCD patient consumes too much protein, their levels of ammonia will be elevated in their blood and you can cause problems to the nervous system and the brain.

But you also could be consuming not enough protein.

And there are some amino acids called essential amino acids.

They need to be consumed everyday, and if you don't get enough of those, your body will breakdown muscles, what they call catabolism, to be able to obtain those essential amino acids.

And so when the body does that, the pneumonia levels in the blood can also go higher.

So you need some protein, but you have to follow the diet prescribed by the dietician to make sure you're not eating more than just what you need.

When a dietitian looks at a diet record provided by a patient, we are not only looking for grams of protein, we are also looking for other nutrients that are important for growth like vitamins and calcium.

We tell the patients to balance their diet.

Trying to use foods from different food groups.

Now you the colours of the rainbow, you should try to keep a diet that is balanced with different colours and different fruits and vegetables to make sure you get all different vitamins and meat to your needs.

Nutritionally.

We wanted to make sure that the families and the patients understand the importance of including foods that have a good nutritional value that could help them be healthy overall.