Could Your Chubby Baby Grow Up Fat?
In a study published this week, Harvard University researchers found that babies whose weight-to-height ratio fluctuates two percentile groups before the age of two are more likely to be obese in adulthood.
The new study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, was conducted on 45,000 Boston-area children over an 18 year period.
The study used seven major cutoffs on the charts, the 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 95th percentiles, to calculate growth pace. An infant whose weight-for-length jumped from the 19th percentile at one month to the 77th at six months crossed three major percentiles--the 25th, 50th and 75th--and would be at risk for obesity later in childhood.
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Although infants who gained weight rapidly were at a higher risk of childhood obesity, only 12 percent of the infants in the authors’ designated high-risk group were obese by the age of 5, considering that 10 percent of all preschool-aged children are obese.
That kind of rapid growth should be a red flag to doctors, and a sign to parents that babies might be overfed or spending too much time in strollers and not enough crawling around, said pediatrician Dr. Elsie Taveras, the study's lead author and an obesity researcher at Harvard Medical School.
Contrary to the popular idea that chubby babies are the picture of health, the study bolsters evidence that "bigger is not better" in infants, she said.
But according to some pediatric physicians, putting infants on diets is a bad idea that could backfire in the long run.
"It reads like a very handy rule and sounds like it would be very useful -- and that's my concern," Dr. Michelle Lampl, director of Emory University's Center for the Study of Human Health.
”The guide would be easy to use to justify feeding infants less and to unfairly label them as fat,” she said. “It could also prompt feeding patterns that could lead to obesity later.”
