Want Leaner Kids? Parents May Need to Toe the Line

[snopes]

It's a trend that has health experts worried: Young kids are becoming increasingly oversized -- leading, they fear, to overweight teens and, ultimately, overweight adults with health problems.

But parents could be poised to do something about this. After all, some experts contend, parents are part of the problem.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20091011...edtotoetheline

[Magpye]

The way parents feed their infants might play a role in this weight gain, another study found. John Worobey... evaluated the behavior of mothers as they fed their babies. His team followed 96 mother-child pairs, asking the mothers questions -- such as what they did when their babies got fussy -- and watching them feed their children formula.

..."Pulling the head away from the bottle is the infant's way to signal, 'Hey, I don't want to do this anymore,'" Worobey said. But the cue is often not noticed.

I didn't see any mention of breastfeeding in this article; they seem to have only studied bottle-feeding mothers. My understanding is that it's pretty easy to overfeed kids with bottles, because the flow rate is so high. This would seem to be another data point in favor of breastfeeding rather than bottle feeding whenever possible - and certainly a condemnation of "propping" bottles or other practices that don't require parents to pay much attention to the kid.

I'm sure other factors come into play, but it is true that in my limited observations, the kids of parents who breastfed have tended to be slender as they are growing up. This may be part of why.