A team of researchers crunched some data about what
mothers feed their infants and came away with disturbing news:
In many cases, infants were fed foods that would
surprise even the least stringent of mothers. Candy, ice cream, soda, and French
fries, for instance, were among the foods some of the babies were being
fed....The immediate danger resulting from poor infant diets is early weight
gain and stunted growth. Larger weight increases were observed in the
infants who consumed higher levels of fat and sugar, and dairy foods (both of
which were associated with poorer households and less educated mothers),
especially at age one. Those same babies were found to be shorter on
average, possibly, the researchers believe, because of a lack of foods that
help promote proper bone growth.
The longer term problem with the discrepancy in
infant dietary patterns is that these differences—specifically the exposure to
certain unhealthy foods, and lack of exposure to certain other healthy ones—can
negatively impact a child's long-term health, eating habits, and food
preferences.
A follow up to the Infant Feeding Practices study,
which analyzed data for the same children at age six, found that infant
feeding patterns appear to translate into similar childhood eating habits.
And those preferences can last a lifetime.
This is yet another example of the ways in which
some of us are born lucky and others aren't—a topic that feels more personal
than ever to me lately. It may be that there's no easy answer to the question
of how to level the developmental playing field even during the first few years
of life, but does anyone seriously disagree that we should try harder.
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