Sure, babies often look a little chubby. That chubbiness is typically acceptable because it makes the baby cute and pudgy, but also because it usually evens out as the baby grows. However, now more than ever, studies have been finding that some babies are not just chubby, but overweight. In fact, in an article on livescience.com, it has been shown that almost one third of 9 month olds are obese or overweight. Though the study is not clear about which babies are included in this study, it states that the study looked a nationally representative sample of children born in 2001.
It makes sense to state that obesity starts at a young age. This study showed that if a baby is overweight at 9 months, it was very likely that the child was going to be overweight at 2 years old from there, and so on and so forth. Numbers-wise, an obese 9 month old baby has a 37.6 percent chance of being a normal weight at age 2, 18% moved into the “at risk of being obsese” category, and the remaining 43.9% stayed in the obese category. Comparing this to the children who were of normal weight at 9 months of age we can see that 75% of those children stayed a normal weight. In the “at risk” category, those who had been at risk at 9 months had a 50% chance of becoming obese by the age of 2.
It is extremely important to keep the young ones healthy. Teaching good habits and eating the right types of food at such a young age is imperative. I think that it is so sad that so many babies are overweight and what is even more sad is that babies typically have no say in what they eat! In other words, they have no control over what they are eating and because of their caretakers, they become obese. Now, that is unfair and not right.
What is one step towards healthier babies? Breastfeeding. According to many doctors, breastfeeding, and not breastfeeding combined with bottle-feeding, prevents obesity. What a simple solution! Other ideas are to promote eating apples rather than drinking juice (which is just sugar) or to gain fiber by another means.
Let’s try to stop obesity from the get go!
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