14 DAY TRIAL // Newborns between the ages of six months and one year tend to get overfed by their mothers, a new scientific research shows, also hinting at the fact that this may be one of the root causes for the rampant spread of obesity among very small children. The condition then develops over the years, and becomes endemic during the teen years, and later on in life. Experts from the Rutgers University Department of Nutritional Sciences, who have published their results in the May/June issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, say that parents demonstrate a poor ability to realize when their kids are satiated with the food they've had to eat.
By constantly forcing the youngsters to eat more than they need to, the parents basically force their bodies to deal with the excess food, and the tissues then begin to gather and retain fat. After the early years, diets and surgeries become the only choice in ridding the body of that fat, but, statistically speaking, very few people have the will to engage in such a commitment. Plus, since they are accustomed from childhood to eating large amounts of food for each meal, they find it psychologically difficult to eat smaller ones in order to lose weight.
96 African American and Hispanic mothers had enlisted for the new study and had their feeding habits assessed, as well as the weight of their children, at a 3-, 6- and 12-month interval. The researchers also analyzed feeding diaries for further clarifications, and paid close attention to each of the kids' evolution, in terms of weight. In order to get the most accurate results, the experts accounted for a large number of socio-economic and developmental factors in the mothers (for the 3-month interval), including birth weight, gender, race or ethnicity, maternal age and education, country of origin, body mass index (BMI) before pregnancy, and weight gain during pregnancy.
The investigation proved that, while for the 0-to-3-month and 3-to-6-month intervals there was no statistical correlation between any of these or other factors and weight gain, the 6-to-12-month one was decisive. During this time, mothers proved to be on average a lot less likely to identify satiety cues in their infants, and, as such, tended to considerably overfeed them. This occurrence was directly related to a pronounced weight gain in those children, who either became overweight, or obese.
“More frequent feedings, particularly with formula, are an easy culprit on which to assign blame. But maternal sensitivity to the infant's feeding state, as reflected by the Feeding Scale scores, suggests that an unwillingness to slow the pace of feeding or terminate the feeding when the infant shows satiation cues may be overriding the infant's ability to self-regulate its intake,” the authors of the study explain. The main RU investigators involved in the research have been John Worobey, PhD, Maria Islas Lopez, MA, and Daniel J. Hoffman, PhD, e! Science News reports.