14 DAY TRIAL // A lot have changed these past years – parents are far busier and less patient than they were once, breast milk can be replaced with all sorts of baby formulas and there is also the baby food that you can buy at your supermarket.
The point is that babies nowadays eat a lot of things they shouldn't, or at least not at their age, and the fussier the baby, the poorer the food gets.
A new study, conducted with data from the North Carolina Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) – a program that helps low-income families afford food, found that fussy babies get introduced to solid foods earlier than calmer kids, and that is a very serious problem because when adding solid foods and juice too early, parents actually add calories to their baby's diet.
Previous research has already established the connection between these extra calories and higher weight and body mass index in infancy and toddlerhood.
The scientists recruited little over 200 first-time moms part of low-income black families, because, according to study author Barbara Goldman, a developmental psychologist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina, previous research showed that they were more likely to feed babies solid foods before the appropriate age.
Several studies published in 2002 and 2006 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, show that the prevalence of early childhood obesity in black children is 10.3%, compared with 12.5% in Hispanics and 8.7% in whites in the United States.
For this study, the researchers visited the families every three months at their homes, since the babies were 3 months old until they reached one year of age.
When the babies turned 18 months, the researchers payed them one last visit.
The mothers had to rate their baby's temperament at every visit, and also report what and how much their babies ate.
The results showed that nearly 70% of babies got at least some breast milk during their first month of life, and only 20% of them got breast milk exclusively.
As the researchers suspected, the numbers would drop rapidly, with only a quarter of the babies being breast-fed by 3 months of age, and at 3 months old, only 5% of babies were getting a breast-milk diet only.
This is bad for the kids' weight, and a recent study found that one third of nine-months-old babies and one third of two-year-old babies are overweight for their height.
Obviously, babies need food to develop well and be healthy so nobody is saying that overweight babies should be put on a diet, however, doctors are concerned because these bad eating habits will stick to the kids all their life.
“Moms are definitely giving kids a lot more to eat than just breast milk, which is the recommended thing up to three months,”Goldman told LiveScience.
“What we're finding is that even if they're not breast-feeding and they're doing formula, they're doing formula plus other things very early.”
The American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that babies breast-feed exclusively until 4 months of age, and 6 months if possible, but in today's society that can be difficult if mothers have to work and babies have several caregivers, added Goldman.
Another AAP recommendation is that solid foods be introduced at earliest after four months – in the North Carolina sample, nearly 20% of one-month-old babies were fed solid foods or juice, and by 3 months, 70% of the children were eating something else besides milk or formula.
Goldman explained that “it's possible that people are not appreciating how young baby's digestive systems really are,” but “they're really not designed for [solid] food.”
To recap, bad-tempered babies are most likely to receive age-inappropriate food, with obese moms giving them solid foods and depressed moms, giving them more juice.
The problem is that even if “you can calm down babies by giving them juice, the downside of that is then you're teaching a kid really early on that if you're in trouble, go and eat something sweet.”
Another downside, of course, is the excess calories – infants being fed formula and solid food or juice had an intake of over 100 more calories a day that what they normally should.
“It's like getting a whole extra day's worth of food” in a week, said Goldman.
“That's a lot of extra food.”
So the best solution is to keep promoting breast-feeding and remind parents that young babies don't need solids.
And if a baby gets fussy, try taking him/her for a walk instead of pumping food and juice into him/her, as a remedy.
The research was reported today in the journal Pediatrics.