Should You Put Your Kids on a Diet?
Experts describe the best ways to keep children from gaining too much weight.
Food, food, food. The ads, the signs, the daily stories about an epidemic of
childhood obesity. Often overweight adults have (pardon the expression) pounds
of baggage about teasing, discrimination, and "dieting."
So what is a parent to do if one or more kids seem to be putting on a few
more pounds than they seem to need?
Bottom line: All children -- not just overweight ones -- would benefit from
eating good quality, healthy, fresh food to use for fuel so they can be active
and perform well in daily life.
"Usually, I see several in a family who are above ideal weight,"
Kattia Corrales-Yauckoes, RD, a nutrition and diabetes educator at the
Harvard-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center, tells WebMD. "But I don't
Hunger Plays a Key Role
Jean Antonello, RN, author of Naturally Thin Kids: How to Protect Your
Kids from Obesity and Eating Disorders for Life, tells WebMD that most
kids today are predisposed to gain weight. "Their bodies have a higher
famine sensitivity," she says. This means their bodies are more likely to
store unburned "fuel" as fat.
"Fat is a survival tool," she says. "Some stressor makes a kid
accumulate extra weight. After years of studying this, I have decided that this
stressor is hunger. When a kid goes hungry ['No eating between meals!'], he or
she tends to overeat, crave sweets and fatty foods, and engage in what we call
makeup eating. Going hungry slows metabolism and increases appetite."
Antonello's answer is to offer children high-quality food. This starts with
newborns, who are now fed "on demand," where they used to be kept on a
four-hour schedule. (Evidence that breastfeeding can prevent obesity in
adulthood is not compelling, Corrales-Yauckoes notes.)
Being fed on demand is normal for babies, Antonello contends. And also for
8-year-olds, 14-year-olds, 22-year-olds -- and everyone.
Some toddlers don't even like to eat much -- they pick or scrunch up their
faces at everything for a day or two. "This may lead parents to offer sweet
or fatty stuff," she says. "Don't. A toddler can get along on a little
for a while. Just offer small amounts -- a tablespoon per year of age is plenty
of an item for a small child."
The key is to nosh on decent-quality foods, which Antonello defines as
salads, veggies, fruits, nuts, lean meats, and grains. "French fries are
borderline, because of how they are prepared," she says. "Once in a
while borderline foods are OK. Then there are the pleasure foods, which are
cakes, cookies, ice cream, and high-fat, high-sugar items." These should be
a treat, not a normal snack.
"Kids eat crap!" Pat Lyons, RN, MA, who is on the steering committee
of the Center for Weight and Health Training at the University of California
Berkeley, exclaims to WebMD. "The old 'eat less, exercise more' thing
doesn't work for adults. Why should it work for kids?"