Food for thought. Just saw this today...alternative view. For info, I have one brother who was really really fat when he was a baby and toddler...now he is very skinny.
It's not just baby fat
Experts are finding that weight problems can take root in the earliest days of life and lead to obesity later
Aug 27, 2006
The Straits Times
BABY fat, that term that conjures images of chunky thighs and padded cheeks, is beginning to carry a new connotation. At a time of much focus on obesity, the word is that cute, blubbery babies can be too fat for their own good.
That's the message emerging from several health groups, including the World Health Organisation.
No one suggests that children younger than two should be placed on a diet, but health experts are becoming more convinced that future weight problems can take root in the earliest days of life.
'Children don't become obese overnight. It's a process,' says Dr Cutberto Garza, co-author of a 2004 WHO study on child growth.
The earliest days of life may be especially important in setting a child up for svelteness or plumpness, scientists are finding. Early feeding patterns may programme a child's metabolism or other aspects of body physiology to increase the chance of becoming overweight.
For example, a study published last year in the British Medical Journal found that big babies and babies who grow quickly in the first two years of life had a ninefold greater risk of obesity in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
Various recent studies also suggest that a woman's weight before pregnancy, her nutrition and weight gain during pregnancy, and the early weeks of infant feeding may exert long-term influence on child growth.