Increase the amount of food is not synonymous with good nutrition, but the opposite may prove to have overweight children and result in high cholesterol and a host of health problems.
Back before computers moved into our exam rooms, I tended paper growth charts ritually at every checkup. Pink for girls, blue for boys. Age on the X-axis, weight on the Y-axis. I paid particular attention to the charts of infants, plotting weight and length and head circumference with my pen month by month to show parents how their babies were growing, to reassure them when they worried that there wasn’t enough breast milk or because their babies were spitting up a little.
It’s a primal impulse to worry about an infant’s growth. But experts on child nutrition, mostly enlisted nowadays in the battle against childhood obesity, point out that some of our standard infant feeding practices and attitudes may need revising, including some of those encouraged by pediatricians like me. My grandmother’s attitude — stuff food into the baby, be proud of a “good eater” — may not make sense in an environment of abundant food and rising obesity.
But it gets medically controversial, and emotionally sticky, when doctors start talking about obesity in babies. Is there an epidemic of infant obesity? Are fat babies at greater risk of turning into fat children at higher risk for medical consequences later on in life? And what can doctors advise parents about feeding a baby — which ought, after all, to be one of the basic joys of parenthood?
The answers to those questions aren’t always clear. Scientists do know that the number of obese children has been on the increase. But not the proportion of those under age 2 whose weight-for-length… continue reading
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