UK NEWS
FEEDING CHARTS THAT ARE MAKING BABIES FATTER
Babies are at risk of becoming obese if they follow guidelines
By Victoria Fletcher
MOTHERS who follow official guidelines on how much their baby should weigh may risk making them obese.
Growth tables used to chart their development have been found to be wildly inaccurate.
Instead of showing the ideal average measurement for a healthy infant, they were based on super-sized American babies of the 1970s.
And even though the World Health Organisation produced more up-to-date charts last year, most health professionals have not started using them yet.
Meanwhile, experts believe, many new mums are panicked into over-feeding their children in the belief that they are too small.
And an increasing amount of research suggests this sets the babies on an early road to obesity.
The problem began in 1977, when Americans drew up an infant-growth chart based on babies being fed high-protein formula milk.
At the time, experts did not know that babies given that milk grew faster and fatter than babies who were breastfed.
What they now realise is that the formula-milk infants weighed around twice as much above the norm as the highest-scoring babies fed on low-protein formula, or those who were breastfed. However, these unusually large babies were used as the “gold standard” for infant growth rates around the world.
Two years ago, the World Health Organisation said it would publish new charts, based on breast-fed babies.
But many healthcare professionals in Britain are still relying on the old figures from the US National Center for Health Statistics.
Bert Koletzko, an expert on the issue at Munich University, said: “The charts have skewed infant nutrition towards overfeeding for decades.
You could say we’ve had avoidable obesity as a result.”
In 2000, the US decided to alter its charts to include more breastfed infants, but many health organisations around the world remain unaware of these changes – or the new charts from the WHO.
A member of the panel that evaluated the new charts – Peter Aggett, of Lancaster University – told New Scientist magazine: “The reaction I get from breastfeeding mothers when I explain the new chart is relief.”
