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2009/10/15
Based on original reporting by HealthDay News
(HealthDay News) - It's a trend that has health experts worried: Young kids are becoming increasingly oversized - leading, they fear, to overweight teens and, ultimately, overweight adults with health problems.
"Parents might be contributing to the overweight epidemic," said Dr. Elsie Taveras, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Harvard Medical School, who has researched the issue.
They do so unwittingly, of course, Taveras said. And the point is not to make parents feel guilty about contributing to their children's weight problems, she said, but to get the word out because the trend is headed in the wrong direction.
"What we found was, those children who gained more weight and gained it more quickly in the first six months of life had a higher risk of obesity when they were 3 years old," Taveras said. Her study was reported in Pediatrics.
The way parents feed their infants might play a role in this weight gain, another study found.
John Worobey, a professor and chairman of the nutritional sciences department at Rutgers University in New Jersey, evaluated the behavior of mothers as they fed their babies. Mothers who fed their babies eight times a day, on average, rather than seven and "who were less sensitive in reading their baby's satiety cues," Worobey said, had babies who gained more weight between ages 6 and 12 months. The findings were reported in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
One solution, he said, is for parents to pay closer attention to their baby's cues, asking their pediatrician for help if they aren't certain how to read those cues.
"Pulling the head away from the bottle is the infant's way to signal, 'Hey, I don't want to do this anymore,'" Worobey said. But the cue is often not noticed. One way to remedy that, he suggests, is for parents to avoid feeding their infants while watching television. "You may be paying more attention to the TV," he said. "It's better to make it one-on-one time."
There could be cultural myths at work, too, he said, with some cultures still believing that a chubby baby is a healthy baby.
Taveras urged parents to check in often about weight with their infant's pediatrician. With about four "well-baby" visits in the first six months, parents should remember to ask each time about their child's weight.
But the parental link to youngsters' weight might start well before birth, perhaps even before pregnancy.
Reporting in the Maternal and Child Health Journal, researchers found that women who start pregnancy at a normal weight but gain more than 25 to 35 pounds increase their child's risk for being overweight at age three.
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Resources
Article - Childhood Obesity
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Parent and Caregivers Influence on Children’s Eating Habits - EatRight Ontario
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Article - Diet, Exercise Cuts Kids’ Risk for Metabolic Syndrome
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