14 DAY TRIAL // Official statistics from the United Kingdom show that, on a national scale, the number of children that are born with extra fat on their bodies is increasing at an alarming rate. The finding is significant, as it highlights an issue which has not been taken into account too much over the years.
Just to make things clear, researchers are not talking about the normal extra fat that newborn babies have, which makes their knees look dimpled and their cheeks adorable. They are talking about excessive fat of the bad kind, that the babies can take with them into childhood.
The reason why this is considered worrying is because the new understanding we have of obesity shows us that the condition's onset can take place very early on in a child's life, and not necessarily when they are a few years old.
University of Texas Medical Branch pediatrician David McCormick says that child obesity is becoming an increasingly-present issue, especially in the developed world, in countries such as the UK and the United States.
But determining exactly which of the children is likely to become obese later in life is very complex, the expert admits, particularly due to the fact that chubby newborns don't necessarily go on to get fat.
In many children, this is just a natural stage in their development, and then they slim down as they get older. A research published this month in the American Journal of Health Promotion shows that one third of young kids make doctors uneasy with their weight.
“Historically about 15 percent of babies were above that weight, and now 30 percent are,” says the author of “Feeding Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Program for Healthy, Safe Nutrition During Pregnancy, Childhood, and Beyond, Alan Greene.
The expert, who holds an appointment as a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was not a part of the new work, LiveScience reports.
Speaking about the percentile of kids' weight for their heights, McCormick explains that about 16 percent of 6-month-olds in the new study were found to be at the 95th percentile or more. About a third of all kids are at the 85th percentile.
“Usually you expect about 5 percent over the 95th percentile, the way the growth curves are designed. So 16 percent is three times as many in that group as we should have had,” McCormick explains.
Diets still remain the weapons of choice in these matters, but not strict ones, of the type obese people use to lose weight. Rather, parents are urged to teach their kids how to eat healthy since they are little, and not extend the hamburger/French fries diet to the young ones.