They Say: You’re Making Your Kid Fat

Hey, you know how everything that ever goes wrong with your kid is totally your fault? Yeah, add another thing to that list. Researchers are looking at the role parents play in childhood obesity, and finding some interesting links between how infants are fed and those babies’ weight when they are older.
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Kids Forbidden to Bike or Walk to School

Here’s a rich one for our desperate-to-get-the-kids-more-exercise society: In the upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs, children at some schools aren’t allowed to bike or walk to school. In fact, when one student rode to school, with his mother, on a bike path, his bike was confiscated (the rule had never been publicized).

The principal goes on at some length rationalizing the rule. Mostly he’s scared of traffic and stranger abductions. Continue reading »

They Say: Formula Not Necessarily Fattening. But!

Researchers studying the influences of body composition in early childhood found that, indeed, babies who were breastfed longer had a lower fat mass that could not be accounted for by genetic differences or height.

But the study isn’t another “Breast is Best” pitch.

Just as influential, researchers found, was a child’s weaning diet – both those being weaned from the breast and those being weaned from formula. Continue reading »