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Remember the good old days when 'fat babies' meant you had a healthy child?
Alarm as US toddlers battle the bulge
Stephen Smith, Boston
December 30, 2006
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world...attle-the-bulge/2006/12/29/1166895478115.html
MORE than one-third of low-income urban children in the United States are already overweight or obese by the time they reach the age of three, according to a study that provides alarming evidence that the battle of the bulge begins when toddlers are barely out of nappies.
Researchers armed with scales and measuring devices visited nearly 2000 families in 20 US cities and evaluated the weight and height of three-year-olds in an unprecedented effort to focus on obesity among vulnerable children.
Their finding: 35 per cent of the low-income three-year-olds were overweight or obese, a result more than twice the US rate for obesity among all preschool children.
Low-income Hispanic children were the most likely of all to have a weight problem, with 44 per cent of those toddlers overweight or obese, the researchers reported in the online version of the American Journal on Public Health.
"We know that many of the habits that people retain for the rest of their life are established in childhood, so it's a critical period to educate folks about what they can do," John Auerbach, of the Boston Public Health Commission, said.
Specialists in pediatric nutrition said the findings mirrored what they witnessed in their practices, with the waistlines of even the youngest patients expanding at a troubling rate. Physicians said the medical consequences could be significant, with toddlers suffering sleep apnoea and misshapen limbs because of their weight.
Overweight toddlers are also at risk of growing up to be overweight, with the attendant constellation of health woes including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Specialists said it was a health crisis fuelled by eating too much calorie-laden processed food and drinking too many sweetened beverages, compounded by children spending more hours in front of TV and computer screens than earlier generations.
But toddlers' weight problems are also a legacy of the obesity epidemic among adults. Overweight mothers tend to give birth to bigger babies who are exposed to insulin imbalances while in the womb that can predispose them to obesity.
"The whole country is struggling with this," Virginia Chomitz, a senior scientist at the Institute for Community Health at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said.
"There's a lot of factors in our environment and our lifestyle that are pushing us towards being fatter. It's an uphill battle to push against that tide."
Since 1971, the share of children nationally who are overweight has doubled, a trend specialists expect will continue.
But Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as scientists from Columbia and Princeton universities, wanted to look at the group that disproportionately bears the burden of obesity: the underprivileged.
Their study, funded by federal agencies and private foundations, focused on a group recognised to be highly vulnerable to obesity, the children of urban, low-income parents, defined in part as those families receiving federal aid to buy food.
The authors defined as overweight children weighing more than 85 per cent of growth-chart figures for their age group; those in excess of 95 per cent of their peers were declared obese.
A three-year-old girl about 90 centimetres tall would be "overweight" if she weighed nearly 17 kilograms; an obese girl would weigh more than about 21 kilograms.
BOSTON GLOBE
Alarm as US toddlers battle the bulge
Stephen Smith, Boston
December 30, 2006
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world...attle-the-bulge/2006/12/29/1166895478115.html
MORE than one-third of low-income urban children in the United States are already overweight or obese by the time they reach the age of three, according to a study that provides alarming evidence that the battle of the bulge begins when toddlers are barely out of nappies.
Researchers armed with scales and measuring devices visited nearly 2000 families in 20 US cities and evaluated the weight and height of three-year-olds in an unprecedented effort to focus on obesity among vulnerable children.
Their finding: 35 per cent of the low-income three-year-olds were overweight or obese, a result more than twice the US rate for obesity among all preschool children.
Low-income Hispanic children were the most likely of all to have a weight problem, with 44 per cent of those toddlers overweight or obese, the researchers reported in the online version of the American Journal on Public Health.
"We know that many of the habits that people retain for the rest of their life are established in childhood, so it's a critical period to educate folks about what they can do," John Auerbach, of the Boston Public Health Commission, said.
Specialists in pediatric nutrition said the findings mirrored what they witnessed in their practices, with the waistlines of even the youngest patients expanding at a troubling rate. Physicians said the medical consequences could be significant, with toddlers suffering sleep apnoea and misshapen limbs because of their weight.
Overweight toddlers are also at risk of growing up to be overweight, with the attendant constellation of health woes including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Specialists said it was a health crisis fuelled by eating too much calorie-laden processed food and drinking too many sweetened beverages, compounded by children spending more hours in front of TV and computer screens than earlier generations.
But toddlers' weight problems are also a legacy of the obesity epidemic among adults. Overweight mothers tend to give birth to bigger babies who are exposed to insulin imbalances while in the womb that can predispose them to obesity.
"The whole country is struggling with this," Virginia Chomitz, a senior scientist at the Institute for Community Health at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said.
"There's a lot of factors in our environment and our lifestyle that are pushing us towards being fatter. It's an uphill battle to push against that tide."
Since 1971, the share of children nationally who are overweight has doubled, a trend specialists expect will continue.
But Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as scientists from Columbia and Princeton universities, wanted to look at the group that disproportionately bears the burden of obesity: the underprivileged.
Their study, funded by federal agencies and private foundations, focused on a group recognised to be highly vulnerable to obesity, the children of urban, low-income parents, defined in part as those families receiving federal aid to buy food.
The authors defined as overweight children weighing more than 85 per cent of growth-chart figures for their age group; those in excess of 95 per cent of their peers were declared obese.
A three-year-old girl about 90 centimetres tall would be "overweight" if she weighed nearly 17 kilograms; an obese girl would weigh more than about 21 kilograms.
BOSTON GLOBE
