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Nutrition is essential for survival, and fortunately even an inadequate nutrition may keep us alive. However, nutrition for growth requires a delicate balance between avoiding insufficient growth and avoiding the provision of too much energy and nutrients that will result in an increased risk of non-communicable diseases, mainly obesity, and may adversely affect children with chronic diseases.

Stunting is one of the world’s largest challenges. In 2016, a WHO report indicated that 22.9% of the children under the age of 5, summing up to 154.8 million children globally, suffer from stunting. This led stunting to be at the top of the list for the WHO targets for 2,025, aiming at 40% reduction in stunting by that year.

Our understanding of the pathophysiology of inappropriate growth and the pathways involved in optimal growth and catch-up growth is evolving, and new data are emerging on the role of our genes, the interaction between nutrition and epigenetic changes involved in growth, the interplay between nutrition and growth factors and hormones in health and in disease states.

As in previous years, leading specialists in nutrition and growth selected a limited number of leading studies in various aspects of nutrition and growth that were published from July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018.

A summary of these studies and a commentary provided by the section editors can be found in this 2019 Year Book on Nutrition and Growth.

We hope that similar to previous years, the summary of the published manuscripts will assist health care providers, physicians, nurses, dietitians, scientists, and anyone interested in nutrition to explore studies that they have missed, stimulate a search for other important studies, and lastly the editorial comments will provide an additional and helpful view of interpretation.

Nutrition and Growth Yearbook covers pregnancy, prematurity, infancy, childhood and adolescence and involves multiple disciplines. Acknowledging that we could not cover all important publications and may have missed some, we hope that all health care providers treating and studying nutrition and growth will find this fifth edition of the yearbook on nutrition and growth useful and helpful in providing our children and parents the best practice possible.

Raanan Shamir, Petach Tikva/Tel Aviv

Dominique Turck, Lille

Berthold Koletzko, Munich

Moshe Phillip, Petach Tikva/Tel Aviv