Should children with coughs avoid eating chicken and shrimp?

Many mothers, when their children cough, avoid giving them shrimp, raw foods like crab, fish, and especially chicken… Is that true or false?

MSc. Dr. Le Thi Hai, former Director of the Nutrition Consultation and Examination Center - National Institute of Nutrition, said that many mothers, when their children cough, avoid giving them shrimp, raw foods such as crab, fish, and especially chicken... That is completely wrong.

According to nutritionist Le Thi Hai, cough is caused by illness, not by food. It is said that eating shrimp causes cough because of its shell and claws. When eating shrimp, if you do not peel the shell and remove the claws, it will easily get stuck in the throat, causing itching and coughing. As for the meat of shrimp, crab, or fish, it is absolutely not the cause of cough.

Avoiding eating chicken when you have a cough is a mistake.

On the contrary, shrimp, crab, and fish are rich in protein and are easy to digest. Therefore, avoiding foods that are commonly considered fishy when children have a cough is a completely wrong idea.

It is also worth mentioning that the idea of ​​​​abstaining from chicken when coughing has become ingrained in the habits and thoughts of many people, while chicken contains a lot of protein, especially zinc. In particular, zinc is one of the very important nutrients involved in the immune system, increasing resistance. Therefore, abstaining from chicken when coughing is not recommended. On the contrary, mothers should feed their children chicken when coughing to increase their resistance.

According to Dr. Hai, shrimp shells are not good for children who are coughing, but they are very good when mothers need to increase calcium for their children. Most people think that eating shrimp will have a lot of calcium because shrimp meat contains this substance and of course, discard all the shells and shrimp claws. But in fact, the calcium is mainly in the shrimp shell and the shrimp meat only provides protein. Therefore, if you want to provide calcium for the body, you can choose small shrimp for children to eat with the shell.

Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Dieu Thuy, Head of the Department of Pediatrics at Hanoi Medical University, also said: Abstaining from chicken and shrimp when having a cough is incorrect. However, for patients with a history of allergies, it is necessary to abstain from and limit eating shrimp, chicken and foods that often cause allergies because they cause the allergy to recur and the cough to worsen.

In addition, the mechanism of cough, in addition to environmental factors, due to infection, viruses, bacteria, there are also neurological factors, emotional changes causing cough and asthma attacks.

For our country, the current season change is also a favorable factor that makes sensitive people cough more, but for children who are more sensitive than normal to weather factors, the symptoms will decrease as they grow older, so parents do not need to worry too much./.

According to VOV