The Ridiculousness...and Evil..Continues

Just a couple of days ago I shared an article about parents who were so scared their babies were fat that they'd put them on diets at the age of 3 or 4 months and were starving them to death. This was a bad thing.

Now we've got this article, from Yahoo News, which states that 1 in 3 of all babies are obese.

Bullshit, if you will excuse the language.

The article uses data collected in 2001, and it covers only 2 age groups. 9 month olds and 2 year olds. Okay, how about another study at 5 or even 10, to see how many of these hideously overweight 2 year olds turned into obese 5 year olds, and then went on to being obese 10 year olds?

In addition, it's not until one of the very last paragraphs in the article, after every parent has been guilted into looking at their pudgy baby and thinking, "Oh my god, no food for you today, little one," when there's a sentence that states, "Hispanic kids, and kids of lower socioeconomic status, are the ones who most tend to be obese."

So what's with this 1 of 3 number then? Of the 8,000 babies surveyed, exactly how many were Hispanic? How many were of "low" socioeconomic status? And why does this article still go ahead and treat all babies with the broad brush. Just how many middle class white, Asian and black kids were obese? Out of how many surveyed?

It's impossible to be obese at 2 years old, unless you've got a mom who really shoves the food down your throat (and yes, you see the occasional kid like that on the front cover of the National Enquirer). But the vast percentage of kids are not obese at 2, at least not as any reasonable person calculates obesity, and to plant this in the minds of young parents - just more social engineering, more propaganda to get people obsessed with weight and fear even being a measly 5 pounds overweight.

What about the 8,000 kids who participated in this study? The researchers never saw them! The parents answered questionaires! Even at that age kids have the same 3 frames that grownups have, small, mediium and large. Was any adjustment made for that?


What do I mean by "social engineering"? Well, here's another sentence from that bottom paragraph:
However, the results could help target health education and other interventions [that's be social engineering, sending kids away to fat camps] to the populations that need them, he said. The study found that Hispanic babies were at the highest risk of becoming overweight or obese. Babies in families of low socioeconomic status were also more likely to be heavy. [Okay, Caucasian and Asian families, you've just been told that the 1 in 3 number doesn't apply to you. The numbers are skewed towards Hispanics, and those of lower socioeconomic status. So don't you go putting your child on a diet, because chances are you don't need to!]

Here's the complete article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20101231/sc_livescience/athirdof9montholdsalreadyobeseoroverweight
The path toward obesity starts at a young age - even before babies transition to a solid diet, according to a new study.

Almost one-third of 9-month-olds are obese or overweight, as are 34 percent of 2-year-olds, according to the research, which looked at a nationally representative sample of children born in 2001. The study is one of the first to measure weight in the same group of very young children over time, said lead researcher Brian Moss, a sociologist at Wayne State University in Detroit. The results showed that starting out heavy puts kids on a trajectory to stay that way.

"If you were overweight at nine months old, it really kind of sets the stage for you to remain overweight at two years," Moss told LiveScience.

Tracking obesity

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood obesity has tripled over the last three decades. In 2008, 19.6 percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 11 were obese.

But less is known about obesity rates in very young children. In fact, researchers hesitate to label children that young as "obese." Recent studies have raised the alarm about particularly large babies, however. One 2009 paper published in the journal Pediatrics found that babies who gain weight rapidly in the first six months of life are at increased risk of being obese by age 3. Another study, published in April 2010 in the Journal of Pediatrics, found that heavy 6-month-olds are more likely to be obese as 2-year-olds.

What can be done?

"Studies have shown that exclusive breastfeeding - breastfeeding alone, not breastfeeding combined with bottle-feeding -prevents obesity," said Dr. David McCormick, senior author of that study at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. "Getting enough fiber - eating apples instead of drinking apple juice, for example - also helps keep babies on track to a healthy weight. By contrast, improper early introduction of cereal by adding it to an infant's bottle promotes obesity."

Overweight infants

Moss and his co-author, William Yeaton of the University of Michigan, used data from a survey called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, which contains data on 8,900 babies at nine months and 7,500 of those same babies at 2 years. (Some families moved out of the country or didn't respond to the second round of surveys.) The researchers classified the babies' weights based on CDC growth charts, which compare a baby's growth to a standardized growth curve. Kids in the 95th percentile of weight were categorized as "obese," while kids in the 85th to 95th percentile were counted as "at-risk," similar to the adult category of "overweight," Moss said.

Even in the first year of life, many babies fall into these two categories, Moss and his colleagues report in the January/February issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion. In the 9-month age group, 15.2 percent of babies were at-risk and 16.7 percent were obese. Among 2-year-olds, just under 14 percent were at-risk and almost 21 percent were obese.

"So you're seeing, combined, more kids being at-risk and obese [in the 2-year-old age group]," Moss said. "Of that combined total, more kids are obese than at-risk at two years."

The find hints at an unfortunate pattern: Kids who start out heavier end up heavier. Of kids who were normal weight at 9 months old, 75 percent were still normal weight at 2 years. But kids who were at-risk at nine months had only a 50 percent chance of being normal weight at age 2. More than 28 percent of at-risk kids ended up obese by their second birthday.