Obesity Has Become More Common

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Recent study found that there was an increasing of overweight in preschool-age children. Children who are overweight at early age have an increase risk of being overweight adult. Scientists noticed that among the overweight population, there were more of children who had not been breastfeed or had breastfed for short period of time compared to those who had. In this epidemiological study, scientists wanted to examine if there is any significant association between breastfeeding and the risk of overweight in children of four year olds.

A multiple regression analysis was performed with the population of 177,304 children up to 60 months of age. The body mass index (BMI) was the dependent variable. BMI is a calculation using a person height and weight to determine of their weight status. Children with BMI over 95th percentile are considered to be overweight. In this study, Children's gender, height, weight, race/ethnicity, breastfeeding and birth weight were the independent variables. Mother's age, education, pre-pregnancy BMI, and weight gain during pregnancy, and postpartum smoking were also taken into consideration.

The analysis result showed the duration of breastfeeding can significantly reduce the risk of overweight, but only among non-Hispanic whites. In addition, breastfeeding at any duration can protect children from underweight. In conclusion to risk of overweight in children, only non-Hispanic white children can benefit from prolonged breastfeeding.

While some researchers have chosen to examine the relationship of overweight and the duration breastfeeding for children of four year olds, other have chosen to study on breastfeeding and children BMI from birth to 13 years of age. The purpose of this epidemiological study was to see if there was any significant correlation between breastfeeding and the BMI growth from birth through 13 years of age.

The subjects were 493 children. 93 of the children were offspring of diabetic pregnancies (ODP), and 399 were offspring of non-diabetic pregnancies (ONDP). Scientist started to measure the children's BMI from birth throughout childhood, and parents would also fill out a self report to measure the breastfeeding, and the timeline was put under 2 categories ( ≥ breast milk-months) or low ( <6 breast milk-months).

When checking the result of BMI measurements, and category of breast-feeding time, both ODP and ONDP with adequate breastfeeding had a slower BMI growth from infancy throughout childhood with those who have low bread-fed. This concluded that breastfeeding has significant influence not only BMI growth in infants, but also throughout their late and early childhood.

Instead of checking the duration of breastfeeding to determine the overweight risk, another group of scientists decided to look into the protein intake during infancy to determine the risk of overweight in children. When compared the formula milk and breast milk, formula milk has more protein intake than human milk. Scientists suggested that higher protein intake could increase the insulin-like growth and consecutively cell proliferation. Cell proliferation is the increase of total cell in the body as result of cell growth and cell division which leads to increase in adipose tissue. Adipose tissue is body fat. Thus scientists want to know whether or not higher intake protein in the first 2 years of life can have any significant influence on overweight in later childhood.

In this epidemiological study, there were total of 1757 healthy infants and divided into 2 groups. 1138 formula-fed were randomly assigned with 2 types of formula milk which consisted of high and low protein. 619 infants were breastfed. Scientists measured both groups weight, length, weight-for-length and BMI at 3, 6, 12 and 24 month of age. The result were expressed in length and weight-for-length Z score based on The 2006 World Health Organization growth standards.

At 24 months, result showed no significant different between length in all groups, but high protein formula-fed children score were significantly higher than both low protein formula-fed and breastfed children. Meanwhile, there was also no different in score of weight-for-length between low-protein formula-fed and breastfed children. In conclusion, this study suggested that higher protein intake in the first 2 years of life have significant impact on children weight and can lead to obesity later in life.

With the results from each of the study case, we know that breastfeeding has long term effects on childhood BMI growth. Since obesity is measured by BMI, breastfeeding helps children to maintain their BMI growth at steady rate thus reduces the risk of being overweight. Breastfeeding also has lower protein intake than formula-milk, and higher protein intake can cause the increase in body fat overtime which leads to obesity. In addition, other study showed prolonged breastfeeding can reduce the risk of overweight among non-Hispanic white children. This could promote other scientists to examine why prolonged breastfeeding only has effect on non-Hispanic white children but not others. Over all, results from study cases have one common that they suggest breastfeeding can significantly reduce the risk of obesity in children.

The result of their study could provide a better understanding in breastfeeding and also prevent many children from obesity. Over all, all three cases study suggest that breastfeeding can significantly reduce the risk of obesity in children.