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American Morning

New Study Released Shows Baby Fat May Not Be So Innocent After All

Aired February 06, 2002 - 08:32   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Parents of newborns obsess over whether or not their child is actually getting enough to eat, not whether they're being overfed. But a new study released just this week showed that the baby fat parents love to tickle may not be so innocent after all. In fact, the new research suggests that how quickly infants gain weight in their early months may actually determine whether or not they become overweight as children and then eventually as adults.

And CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen has the skinny for us this morning.

Nice to see you in town again.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Nice to see you, too.

You know, Paula, this new study out of Philadelphia actually really rocks the conventional wisdom in the pediatric world about babies and weight gain. It's always been thought that it's great babies gain lots of weight in the early months of life, and there's no such thing as a baby who gained too much weight, but this study really questioned this.

In fact, everybody thinks that fat babies are great. There is even a Web site called bigfatbaby.com, and they have all of these just really cute pictures. There's a couple of fat rear ends. This baby looks a lot like his dog, and there you go. And if you can just see those rolls of fat, and those rolls of fat have always been thought to be good, both by pediatricians and by mommies and daddies. This baby called the Michelin baby on the Web Site. He is just absolutely adorable.

But what this study says is that babies who gain a lot of weight in first four months of life may be in trouble later on in childhood. Let's look at the numbers. The average weight gain among the 25,000 babies they studied during the first four months of life was six pounds. Babies who gained just two or three more pounds than that average were twice as likely to be overweight at age seven.

Now other studies have shown that children who are overweight are much more likely to become overweight as adults. So in other words what the study is saying maybe we should be worried earlier than we thought we should be. ZAHN: Yet another thing for mommies to have to worry about it. What are you supposed to do about it, if your child is gaining weight too fast?

COHEN: Well, actually, breast-feeding is a great idea. That actually will help the baby keep his or her weight down. Let's take a look. We actually have a couple of suggestions that doctors have told us. First of all, do not put your infant on a diet. We capitalize that for a reason. Bad idea. Don't do that. Just let them gain weight as their going through. The study does not mean that you should put your baby on a diet.

Breast feed, and the reason for that is that breast-fed babies are usually thinner than formula-fed babies. And don't start your baby on solids until six months old. That's a problem. Sometimes parents start their babies on solid foods early, and they kind of bulk up, which is not a good thing.

ZAHN: So wait a minute, so if you breast feed, you can't overfeed your child, but if you bottle feed, you can?

COHEN: If you bottle feed you can, because you're putting that bottle in the baby's mouth, whereas when you breast-feed, the baby can come and go as it wants.

ZAHN: Yes, I guess the baby may be self-regulating there.

COHEN: Right, much better.

ZAHN: What is the doctor's best explanation of these results?

COHEN: They don't completely know, because tight first time that a study this big, 25,000 kids, kind has found this, so they need to study it more. What they think is that when they looked at rats, they did the same thing. They took rats and they fed them a lot during infancy, and then fed them normally later on. And what they found was that afterwards when they autopsied the rats, those rats had abnormal appetite control centers in their brain.

So they think that maybe, and this is big maybe, because this was in rats, and not in actual real human beings, that maybe a lot of food very early on changes the way appetite is regulated later in life.

ZAHN: It strikes me this going to spark that whole debate about breast feeding versus bottle feeding again, and the whole question of when you start your kids on solids, as you just said in your little piece of advice there.

COHEN: Exactly. Solids later on. Don't start them too soon. I think the debate that is really going to start is when someone takes their baby to the doctor at three months, and they're been gaining lots and lots of weights, doctors now may think twice or say, gosh, I just really -- I don't know if this is such a good thing, because of this study, but many more studies immediate to be done before a doctor can say hold off.

ZAHN: You're a working mom. You know that some of us discovered cereal at four months, because it helps them sleep at night.

Remember those days, Jack, staying up all night with those babes in your household?

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The minute they tell you solid foods will get them through the night, you reach right for that cereal box. Eat some of this and go to bed.

Thank you.

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