Let your Children Chew the fat
Low-fat foods for children can deprive them of vital nutrients and lead to obesity later in life, according to recent research. The solution is for parents to lead by example with a varied diet.
And yet, parents’ paranoia about the thickening girths of the Play-Station generation has reached fever pitch: more than a quarter of children in English secondary schools are clinically obese, almost double that of a decade ago. But experts are concerned that parents’ attempts to steer children on to a virtuous dietary path can often backfire.
Last week, Dr John Kostyak and a team from the Pennsylvania State University warned in the online magazine Nutrition Journal that so-called “muesli mothers” are taking adult dietary messages to extremes and inflicting them on their children. Of particular concern, Kostyak says, are very low-fat diets consumed by an increasing number of children.
In their study, the Pennsylvania researchers found that children burn considerably more body fat than adults relative to the amount of energy that they use. By cutting out good fats – such as olive oil and sunflower oil – parents are effectively putting their child’s natural development in jeopardy. “Sufficient fat must be included in the diet for children to support normal growth and development,” Kostyak says.
Rachel Cooke, a spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, says that a healthy diet should consist of about 30 per cent fats, mainly unsaturated from plant sources, and that getting less “might mean that children miss out on vital nutrients, essential fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E that are vital for good health”.
There are also other, less obvious, risks of limiting fat intake. As unlikely as it seems, it could eventually make children fatter than those who gorge on calorie-dense snacks.
This month Canadian researchers produced findings in the journal Obesity that suggest that low-fat diets are not beneficial for children. In a study of rats, the sociologist Dr David Pierce, from the University of Alberta’s Institute of Human Nutrition, found that diet foods can distort the connection that the brain makes between taste and calorie content. In experiments, Pierce and his colleagues showed how the animals learn to associate the flavor of a food with the amount of energy it provides. When juvenile and adolescent rats were fed sweet or salty low-calorie foods over time, the younger animals later overate when fed similar-tasting calorie-dense foods.
The findings suggested that the diet foods distorted the younger rats’ ability to recognize calories and to regulate energy intake. Older, adolescent rats seemed unaffected, probably because they did not rely on taste-related cues. Pierce says his rat studies may provide important clues about how early taste conditioning can lead to overeating and obesity. “Our results indicate that in young children, diet foods may be a poor substitute for healthy foods with sufficient calories to meet energy needs,” he says. “The use of diet food and drinks from an early age into adulthood may induce overeating and gradual weight gain.”
Cooke says that, while more work needs to be done to prove that the effect holds true in young humans, it is the latest in a glut of emerging evidence that parents have a huge influence on altering instinctive food choices in their child’s early years. Babies are born with an innate preference for sweet and salty foods and with internal hunger cues that send satiety signals to the brain. It is social and environmental influences that shape the individual food preferences we develop by adolescence and adulthood, but none more so, it seems, than those in a child’s own home.
A study published a few months ago by researchers from the University of Sheffield discovered, for instance, that parents who restrict their child’s food intake in the belief that they are instilling healthy-eating parameters could be misguided.
Reporting in the Journal of Public Health, Dr Elizabeth Goyder and her colleagues at the School of Health and Related Research reviewed 26 studies analyzing how parents feed their children and attempt to control their diets. Common practices, such as limiting snack foods and openly encouraging children to eat more nutritious foods, were more likely to contribute to weight gain than to prevent it.
What seems to happen when children are exposed to this sort of parental behavior, says Goyder, is that internal hunger cues become confused. Pressure to eat certain foods and to avoid others leads to “uninhibited eating and weight gain, particularly among girls” as they eventually fail to recognize satiety.
“Children should be allowed to learn to regulate their own food intake by responding to their internal hunger and satiety cues,” Goyder says. “This can seem counterintuitive to some parents, especially those who want to oversee what their children eat, but otherwise there can be psychological and physical consequences.” No food, says Cooke, should be banned unless it places a child at medical risk. “As a dietitian, I have seen countless cases of children who are banned from eating certain foods at home, only to develop an obsession about them when they are with their friends or at school,” she says.
“What and how much children eat is the result of a complex interplay of learnt, innate and environmental factors. Keeping them healthy is not as simple as cutting something out.”
Neither does it come down to parental coaxing to “eat up” what is on their plate. In fact, parents who do try the gentle art of persuasion to encourage healthy eating could unwittingly be encouraging weight gain. Dr Julie Lumeng and Lori Burke, of the University of Michigan, videoed and evaluated the eating patterns of four different foods by 21 mother and child pairs. They counted how many times a mother prompted her son or daughter to eat and found that, on average, the children complied with those prompts two-thirds of the time. While obese or overweight mothers did not prompt more often, their children were more likely to respond by eating (67 per cent of the time) than the offspring of nonobese mothers, who complied with 52 per cent of prompts to eat.
“A growing body of evidence suggests that maternal feeding behaviors are related to childhood obesity risk,” says Lumeng. “Prompting may cause a child to eat more even when full, therefore teaching them to ignore internal hunger cues.” Quite how difficult it is for a parent to instill healthy eating habits was outlined in a paper compiled for the British Nutrition Foundation by Lucy Cooke, a researcher at University College London’s Health Behavior Unit. Promising children a reward for eating – eat up your peas and you can watch TV – has been shown to decrease their liking for it.
Likewise, says Rachel Cooke, telling a child something is good for them “should be avoided, as a ‘healthy label’ appears to imply a negative image”. When a group of 40 nine to 11-year-olds was offered an unfamiliar drink, those who were told it was a “new health drink” were less likely to admit liking it than those told it was a “new drink”.
So what is a parent to do? Cooke says parents should remember that they act as role models and that children are more likely to do as they do than to act on what they say. “Their own eating habits are enormously influential,” she says. “It is also important to realize that repeated exposure to certain foods can increase acceptance, so don’t give up. Children need as wide a variety of foods as possible.”
Crucially, though, parents should not be over controlling or obsessive. “If you restrict what children eat, you are likely to do more harm than good,” Goyder says. “They lose their ability to determine when they are really hungry, which can lead to them eating too much. It is better to provide reasonably healthy foods, a few snacks and then leave them to their own devices.”
How to feed your children
Source: TimesOnline UK
And yet, parents’ paranoia about the thickening girths of the Play-Station generation has reached fever pitch: more than a quarter of children in English secondary schools are clinically obese, almost double that of a decade ago. But experts are concerned that parents’ attempts to steer children on to a virtuous dietary path can often backfire.
Last week, Dr John Kostyak and a team from the Pennsylvania State University warned in the online magazine Nutrition Journal that so-called “muesli mothers” are taking adult dietary messages to extremes and inflicting them on their children. Of particular concern, Kostyak says, are very low-fat diets consumed by an increasing number of children.
In their study, the Pennsylvania researchers found that children burn considerably more body fat than adults relative to the amount of energy that they use. By cutting out good fats – such as olive oil and sunflower oil – parents are effectively putting their child’s natural development in jeopardy. “Sufficient fat must be included in the diet for children to support normal growth and development,” Kostyak says.
Rachel Cooke, a spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, says that a healthy diet should consist of about 30 per cent fats, mainly unsaturated from plant sources, and that getting less “might mean that children miss out on vital nutrients, essential fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E that are vital for good health”.
There are also other, less obvious, risks of limiting fat intake. As unlikely as it seems, it could eventually make children fatter than those who gorge on calorie-dense snacks.
This month Canadian researchers produced findings in the journal Obesity that suggest that low-fat diets are not beneficial for children. In a study of rats, the sociologist Dr David Pierce, from the University of Alberta’s Institute of Human Nutrition, found that diet foods can distort the connection that the brain makes between taste and calorie content. In experiments, Pierce and his colleagues showed how the animals learn to associate the flavor of a food with the amount of energy it provides. When juvenile and adolescent rats were fed sweet or salty low-calorie foods over time, the younger animals later overate when fed similar-tasting calorie-dense foods.
The findings suggested that the diet foods distorted the younger rats’ ability to recognize calories and to regulate energy intake. Older, adolescent rats seemed unaffected, probably because they did not rely on taste-related cues. Pierce says his rat studies may provide important clues about how early taste conditioning can lead to overeating and obesity. “Our results indicate that in young children, diet foods may be a poor substitute for healthy foods with sufficient calories to meet energy needs,” he says. “The use of diet food and drinks from an early age into adulthood may induce overeating and gradual weight gain.”
Cooke says that, while more work needs to be done to prove that the effect holds true in young humans, it is the latest in a glut of emerging evidence that parents have a huge influence on altering instinctive food choices in their child’s early years. Babies are born with an innate preference for sweet and salty foods and with internal hunger cues that send satiety signals to the brain. It is social and environmental influences that shape the individual food preferences we develop by adolescence and adulthood, but none more so, it seems, than those in a child’s own home.
A study published a few months ago by researchers from the University of Sheffield discovered, for instance, that parents who restrict their child’s food intake in the belief that they are instilling healthy-eating parameters could be misguided.
Reporting in the Journal of Public Health, Dr Elizabeth Goyder and her colleagues at the School of Health and Related Research reviewed 26 studies analyzing how parents feed their children and attempt to control their diets. Common practices, such as limiting snack foods and openly encouraging children to eat more nutritious foods, were more likely to contribute to weight gain than to prevent it.
What seems to happen when children are exposed to this sort of parental behavior, says Goyder, is that internal hunger cues become confused. Pressure to eat certain foods and to avoid others leads to “uninhibited eating and weight gain, particularly among girls” as they eventually fail to recognize satiety.
“Children should be allowed to learn to regulate their own food intake by responding to their internal hunger and satiety cues,” Goyder says. “This can seem counterintuitive to some parents, especially those who want to oversee what their children eat, but otherwise there can be psychological and physical consequences.” No food, says Cooke, should be banned unless it places a child at medical risk. “As a dietitian, I have seen countless cases of children who are banned from eating certain foods at home, only to develop an obsession about them when they are with their friends or at school,” she says.
“What and how much children eat is the result of a complex interplay of learnt, innate and environmental factors. Keeping them healthy is not as simple as cutting something out.”
Neither does it come down to parental coaxing to “eat up” what is on their plate. In fact, parents who do try the gentle art of persuasion to encourage healthy eating could unwittingly be encouraging weight gain. Dr Julie Lumeng and Lori Burke, of the University of Michigan, videoed and evaluated the eating patterns of four different foods by 21 mother and child pairs. They counted how many times a mother prompted her son or daughter to eat and found that, on average, the children complied with those prompts two-thirds of the time. While obese or overweight mothers did not prompt more often, their children were more likely to respond by eating (67 per cent of the time) than the offspring of nonobese mothers, who complied with 52 per cent of prompts to eat.
“A growing body of evidence suggests that maternal feeding behaviors are related to childhood obesity risk,” says Lumeng. “Prompting may cause a child to eat more even when full, therefore teaching them to ignore internal hunger cues.” Quite how difficult it is for a parent to instill healthy eating habits was outlined in a paper compiled for the British Nutrition Foundation by Lucy Cooke, a researcher at University College London’s Health Behavior Unit. Promising children a reward for eating – eat up your peas and you can watch TV – has been shown to decrease their liking for it.
Likewise, says Rachel Cooke, telling a child something is good for them “should be avoided, as a ‘healthy label’ appears to imply a negative image”. When a group of 40 nine to 11-year-olds was offered an unfamiliar drink, those who were told it was a “new health drink” were less likely to admit liking it than those told it was a “new drink”.
So what is a parent to do? Cooke says parents should remember that they act as role models and that children are more likely to do as they do than to act on what they say. “Their own eating habits are enormously influential,” she says. “It is also important to realize that repeated exposure to certain foods can increase acceptance, so don’t give up. Children need as wide a variety of foods as possible.”
Crucially, though, parents should not be over controlling or obsessive. “If you restrict what children eat, you are likely to do more harm than good,” Goyder says. “They lose their ability to determine when they are really hungry, which can lead to them eating too much. It is better to provide reasonably healthy foods, a few snacks and then leave them to their own devices.”
How to feed your children
- Don’t restrict fat intake to below 30 per cent of a child’s diet. Children need fat for growth and development. This is especially important for the under5s, who should not be given semi-skimmed or skimmed milk or any other low-fat version of a food.
- Don’t ban any foods – even seemingly unhealthy ones. It can trigger extreme eating habits, encouraging uninhibited eating which leads to weight gain.
- Allow children to follow their natural appetites when deciding how much or how little to eat.
- Set a good example. If you want children to eat more fruit and vegetables, make sure you are seen doing the same.
- Don’t instill the idea that there are “good” and “bad” foods. Inducing guilt about diet can lead to eating problems including anorexia nervosa or overeating, studies have shown.
- Encourage children to eat as wide a variety of foods as possible to ensure that they become accustomed to different tastes, textures and flavors.
Source: TimesOnline UK
Labels: child health, children diet, children health, children nutrition
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