| |
14 October,
2005
As
obesity reaches epidemic proportions in the United States
— 30 percent of adults
are obese and 65 percent of children are obese
or overweight — researchers are looking for keys to prevent
it. Those efforts may need to begin in childhood, the researchers
said.
"Levels of obesity are increasing in the population,
and halting the rising prevalence of obesity is a public health
priority," said study lead author Dr. Janis Baird, a research
fellow at the MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre at the University
of Southampton.
"It is not clear how early prevention can begin," she
added.
Nurture, More Than Nature
To determine whether obesity
may begin in infancy, Baird and her colleagues looked at 24
studies that found a relationship between infant size or growth
during the first two years of life and obesity later in life.
They found that the heaviest infants and those who gained weight
rapidly during the first and second year of life faced a nine-fold
greater risk of obesity in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
"These
findings suggest that factors in infant growth are probably
influencing the risk of later obesity," Baird said. "There
are many factors that do influence infant growth. What's needed
now are much more detailed studies to look at how infants grow
and what the predictors of their growth are."
The study findings
appear in the Oct. 14 online edition of the British
Medical Journal. (The original paper is here.)
One expert believes that
nurture, more than nature, is responsible for the rise in obesity
among children.
"If people take this too seriously, people
may start calorie-restricting their infants, which is a bad
thing," said Dr. Dennis Woo, chairman of the pediatrics department
at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, in California.
Learn from
Infants?
According to Woo, children regulate their own calorie
intake.
"A lot of kids eat what they want to eat, and they
do a pretty good job of regulating their weight and height
balance. There are some kids who grow rapidly in the first
year, but then they go through a phase where they become picky
as far as their eating goes," added Woo, who's also an assistant
clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California,
Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine.
Woo advises parents
to let infants eat what they want to eat and not force them
to eat during the time they are picky about eating. "We are
fighting the cultural belief that fat babies are healthy babies," Woo
said. "So people like to fatten their kids up."
Many parents
also believe fat babies are fine because they slim down when
they are older, Woo said. "That doesn't always happen. People
use that as a rationale for really stuffing their kids."
"There
is nothing wrong with a baby being heavy as an infant as long
as he's regulating his own eating," Woo said. "There will come
a time when he will not be growing and he will cut down on
his eating. Most of the time, those are the big babies who
then slim down."
Woo believes healthy eating habits begin in
infancy.
"We want to teach all kids healthy eating habits right
from the very beginning," he said. "We need to shape how people
look at eating. Because infants don't have the psychological
cues that adults have, they respond to their biological needs.
We could actually learn from infants about how to eat."
More
information: The National Institutes
of Health can tell you more about childhood obesity.
© 2004 Daily News Central
|
