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Controlled Infant Feeding and the Obesity Link
Should Parents Restrict How Much Their Baby Eats?
By Lisa A. Goldstein
Restricting how much your 1-year-old eats may result in a lower weight at age 2. While this result may seem obvious, this finding of a recent study published in the January 2008 issue of Pediatrics, actually contradicts many earlier pediatric research studies.
"These results were surprising because a great deal of previous research has shown that the use of restriction when feeding children predicts that children want to eat more of the restricted food, and that they subsequently gain more weight," says study co-author Dr. Claire Farrow, lecturer at Loughborough University, Leicestershire, England, in the Centre for Research into Eating Disorders.
While the results of "Controlling Feeding Practices: Cause or Consequence of Early Child Weight" may encourage parents to resort to restrictive behavior, the authors caution that the negative impact of restricting children's food preferences and self-regulation of food intake may manifest later in development.
"Research around the world has repeatedly shown that when children are older (e.g. 5 years plus) and they are exposed to restrictive feeding practices, they tend to interfere with the child's internal regulation of their hunger and satiety and to predict that the child is more likely to eat when s/he is not hungry," Dr. Farrow says. "Children who are exposed to restriction also tend to prefer to eat those foods that have been restricted, and are likely to gain more weight in the longer term. So restriction really is not an adaptive parental feeding strategy."
Indeed, parents shouldn't restrict their child's eating. After all, children are born with the instinctive ability to manage their weight by eating when they're hungry and stopping when they're full, says Dr. Michelle May, author of the children's book "H" Is for Healthy – Weight Management for Kids
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