Old charts 'fuel obesity crisis'
Updated on 26 April 2007
Outdated growth charts used to assess how infants should be fed may have set thousands of babies on the path to obesity, it has been claimed.
The American charts, introduced in the 1970s before the start of the obesity epidemic, were intended to prevent malnutrition. Some experts now suspect that they wrongly classified lean but healthy babies as underweight.
Many believe the charts relied on growth figures for unusually heavy babies, almost all of whom were were bottle-fed and from white, middle-class US families.
Evidence supporting the critics has now come from a European study looking at the effects of infant nutrition on adult obesity.
Their findings suggest that babies fed high-protein formula milk put on weight far faster and more extensively than those fed breast milk or low-protein infant formula.
Dr Bert Koletzko, from the University of Munich in Germany, who heads the team, said of the growth charts: "They have skewed infant nutrition towards overfeeding for decades. You could say we've had avoidable obesity as a result."
Dr Koletzko presented preliminary results from the programme, known as Earnest, last week.
A total of 1,000 infants in five European countries randomly received breast milk, low protein formula milk, or high protein formula milk, and were monitored until the age of two. At any given age, babies in the high protein group weighed around twice as much above the norm as the highest-scoring babies in other groups.
"Children in the high-protein group were significantly heavier," said Dr Koletzko, who presented the results at a nutrition conference in Budapest, Hungary.
He believes extra amino acids in high-protein infant formula could drive up production of hormones that promote growth and fat storage. The most popular growth charts, produced by the US National Centre for Health Statistics (NCHS), have been used for nearly 30 years. There is growing acceptance that the charts are out of date, said New Scientist.
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