Overweight and Obesity from infant to childhood

Overweight and Obesity in Childhood, Are Solid Foods Given Prematurely?

Delayed introduction of solid feeding reduces child overweight and obesity at 10 years.

Good work — from APA guidelines, to the analysis and the treatment of assignment questions. You are fully integrating each week’s concepts into your Individual Assignments.Abstract There seems to be a discrepancy of when to introduce solids to an infant. Some pediatricians are advising their patient’s parents that it is okay to introduce fruits and vegetables to an infant at four months of age. There are some government agencies that are advising their program participants not to introduce solid fruits and vegetables until six months of age. Who is right and who is wrong? This article is discussing if the introduction of solid foods to an infant could be one of the causes of overweight and obesity in childhood. Six hundred and twenty participants were used in the study. Several telephone interviews were recorded over the course of two years. At 10 years old, 307 of the participant’s height and weight were measured.

Postponement introduction of solid foods was associated with reduced odds of being overweight/obese at age 10 years, after controlling for socioeconomic status, parental smoking and childcare attendance. Delayed introduction of solid feeding reduces child overweight and obesity at 10 years

Problem

Childhood obesity has become a growing problem around the world. Scientists, researchers, physicians, teachers, and parents are trying to study how to reverse this epidemic. Several studies are consistently being done to either cure the problem or find out where and when it begins. This paper will discuss where the problem is possibly beginning.

Study Purpose

The studies were conducted to illustrate a link of overweight and obesity in childhood due to the introduction of solid foods too early in infancy. One issue that has not been measured is the timing of the introduction of solid foods. Childhood obesity has become an epidemic and has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years (CDC, 2013). Researchers have been trying to understand why this happens and what we can do to prevent it. The long-term effects of this epidemic can and are grave.

Hypothesis

Is there a connection between the timing of introducing solid foods and overweight and obesity in childhood? There is definitely a connection between the timing of introducing solid foods and children being overweight/obese in childhood. The research was conducted on six hundred and twenty subjects during 1990 to 1994. However, only three hundred and seven subjects were able to be used due to controlling for socioeconomic status, parental smoking, and childcare attendance. A total of 18 telephone interviews were recorded over the first 2 years of life regarding the infant’s feeding practices. At 10 years of age, the children’s height and weight were measured. Ethical considerations in the study were done by not utilizing the name of the participants. Permission had to be gotten in order to continue to follow up with these participants as the years went on. All women were recruited with informed consent, and the Mercy Hospital ethics committee provided ethics approval for the study. There have not been any subjective opinions seen in the discussion or results of the observation.

Statistical analysis is also a very useful tool to get approximate solutions when the actual process is highly complex or unknown in its true form (explorable.com). The statistical analysis is giving us information that has not been researched and/or is unknown. There has been research conducted about bottle-feeding vs. breastfeeding and the impact that it has on childhood obesity and being overweight as a child. The statistical significance of this study is reliable due to the fact that all insignificant variables were removed so that the only information that is being analyzed was the correct data regarding obesity in children that have been introduced to solids earlier than necessary.

Results

The data collection procedures were appropriate because of very detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria. The data and collection procedures were accurate to ensure validity. An opportunistic analysis of data from the Melbourne Atopy Cohort Study (MACS), a longitudinal study conducted from birth to 10 years, to determine the association between infant feeding practices and child overweight/obesity. In a longitudinal study subjects are followed over time with continuous or repeated monitoring of risk factors or health outcomes, or both. Such investigations vary enormously in their size and complexity (bmj.com).

An observational study is a study in which inferences are drawn or hypotheses tested through observational methods. Two common varieties are the descriptive study, where events are simply observed and described as they take their natural course, and the analytic epidemiologic study, which does not include any intervention or experimentation; examples include the case-control study and the cohort study. As human experimentation is fraught with ethical problems and often not feasible, many important epidemiologic discoveries have had to rely entirely on observational studies (healthline.com). The results match the conclusion. The results showed that there was an increase in BMI for those children at 10 years of age that were introduced to solid food at approximately 20 instead of 24 weeks. Solid foods were defined as any food other than milk, including baby cereal and pureed foods.

Data Analysis Procedures

The simplest analysis of qualitative data is observer impression: Expert or bystander observers examine the data, interpret it via forming an impression and report their impression in a structured and sometimes (quasi-) quantitative form. This attempt to give structure to mere observation is referred to as “coding” and forms an important step beyond the mere observation. Coding is an interpretive technique that seeks to both organize the data and provide a means to introduce the interpretations of it into certain quantitative methods (qualitative-data-analysis.com). This study was quantitative because it was expressed/shown in a table. The difference between qualitative and quantitative are: Qualitative provides explanation and information on something in words and Quantitative data can bje expressed numerically. Conclusion

An observational study was conducted over a 10 year period to see if there was a connection between early introduction (20 weeks) of solid foods to infants and overweight and obesity in childhood. However delaying the introduction of solids by just four weeks (24 weeks) would reduce the odds of child overweight/obesity. The results support the hypothesis by proving that there is an association between child overweight/obesity and the early introduction of solid foods. However, there is a slight possibility of a genetic predisposition of obesity. Research efforts may need to be expanded to identify what other factors that may also play a role of obesity in children. Examples of this are parental smoking, maternal education, type of residence, father’s occupational status, regular childcare attendance, and BMI at birth. Ultimately, the findings insinuate that the prenatal period may be a crucial time for public health intervention of slowing down or even stopping childhood overweight and obesity.

References
Seach, K. A., Dharmage, S. C., Lowe, A. J., & Dixon, J. B. (2010). Delayed introduction of solid feeding reduces child overweight and obesity at 10 years. International Journal of Obesity, 34(10), 1475-9. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2010.101