Should children diet?

Press, 13 February 1986, Page 16

Should children diet?

Not so long ago, plumpness was regarded as desirable in children. Parents delighted in chubby cheeks and dimpled knees, seeing the plumpness as a sign of robust good health. The medical profession encouraged this, regarding a certain degree of fatness as insurance against the debilitating effects of infectious diseases. The thin child was a source of anxiety to doctors, teachers and parents. Today, the situation has changed completely: fat children are now the focus of attention. These children are exposed to considerable social pressures to lose weight and are often miserable and unhappy when made to follow slimming programmes devised for sedentary obese adults. This is the view of Dr

Rosalie Davida-Horvath, former medical officer in Christchurch. She believes that as a general rule children and adolescents should not indulge in slimming diets of any kind until they have finished growing. While she agrees that overeating leads to obesity, she is also convinced that the small amount of exercise fat children tend to take is more important than large amounts of food. The proportion of body weight that is fat changes according to age, sex and physical activity, she points out. It falls and rises in the same individual throughout life. At birth, fat makes up only 12 per cent of the baby’s weight; by six months this has risen to 30 per cent; over the next 10 years it will decline to about 18 per cent. Then at

puberty girls tend to get fatter, boys leaner. For most adolescents in our society, body fat content ranges from 15 per cent to 23 per cent. Obese children have fat stores greatly in excess of this. She admits that no-one really understands why most children keep their fat stores within normal limits, while the unfortunate few lay down excessive amounts and become obese. The current view is that fat accumulates in body stores because the intake of energy (calories) exceeds the body’s requirements.

“This does not mean that fat children have an excessive food intake. They do not. Indeed many fat children eat no more, and some actually eat less than their lean counterparts. However, the fact remains that fat children

do eat more food than they need for their individual energy requirements,” she says. The safe way to control weight in children is to increase the amount of energy they use, and establish exercise habits that will help control weight throughout life. “Regular daily exercise should be viewed as a long term project, not to be stopped on leaving school, but carried on into middle age and beyond,” she maintains.

She admits that very occasionally, fat children may need to diet possibly because they suffer from some condition where exercise might be impractical or harmful, or because they are so obese it severly restricts their movements. Where excess body fat is the result of gross overeating over a long period, children’s dietary habits may need modifying. But even then she is cautious. “In none of these instances should the dieting of very fat children be undertaken without professional advice and supervision. “Dieting is by no means as simple and rewarding as popular articles would have us believe and it can be dangerous in certain instances,” she says.

“There is a small but increasing number of young people who do themselves severe harm, and even endanger their lives, with slimming diets carried to the extreme.”