Is Advertising Contributing To An Obesity Epidemic? Your Health ...

From The CT News Junkie?..

A pediatrician from the Children?s Health Center at St. Mary?s Hospital in Waterbury thinks so.

?Commercialism is driving change in how we feed our infants,? Dr. M. Alex Geertsma told a group of advocates Monday at a Capitol forum on childhood obesity.

Geertsma said infants go from nursing or breastfeeding, which has proven to prevent childhood obesity, to eating additive-free, pureed mixed of foods.

?This is where the good news stops,? Geertsma said.

Problems arise at a greater rate when infants begin to give social cues that they are ready to consume more than liquids and purees. After being on a liquid diet for the first six months of life, they begin to taste discriminate, or recognize certain foods as tasty or disgusting. They begin to want something ?novel? whether it is extremely sweet or really salty.

?This suggests to me that we?re meant to continue to get a variety of different foods as we got a little bit older,? Geertsma said.

This is when the foods that appear on grocery store shelves begin to be detrimental to children?s health. The change in palate prompts the food industry to make mixed dinners with huge amounts of added starch and finger foods like ?heavily spiced? Gerber Lil? Graduates Meat Sticks, Geertsma said.

These meat sticks contain 300 mg of sodium.

Starting at age nine, children start eating cookies and fruit snacks, Geertsma said. This provides kids with huge amounts of added sugar and ?clearly primes the pump for them to prefer certain foods.? Think Oreos and gummy bears.

?I try to explain these things to parents and there?s an initial resistance,? Geertsma said ?But as they talk about it in terms of normal developmental processes they re-think why they respond to their children?s demands for eating things and they start to see this as a manipulation.?

At the forum, Geertsma discussed the normal growth process in which there is an increase body fat that occurs after the percentage of body fat reaches its lowest point.

?Infants will grow most rapidly in particularly weight versus height during the first six months of life,? Geertsma said. ?They then slow somewhat, but then really slow down in the period from one to approximately seven or eight years of life.?

So most children look fairly lean during that period of time, he added.

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Source: http://www.lensaunders.com/wp/?p=7033

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