From Your Health Journal…..”Education Week is one of the best web sites on the net for health related stories, and I recommend my visitors going there to see some of their work. Today’s article to review is one about day care kids and obesity. It is bad enough that these kids can get a cold very easily while at day care, but now, they are prone to childhood obesity. The study showed these kids were 50% more likely to become obese over those who stayed at home – this is a significant increase! This difference cannot be explained by known risk factors such as socioeconomic status of the parents, breastfeeding,the body mass index of the mother, or employment status of the mother. More research is going to have to go into this, as the researchers do not have a definitive answer to why this happens, but most likely it is related to poor diet and lack of physical activity. Please visit the Education Week web site to read the full story.”
From the article…..
Parents whose young children regularly attend day care outside the home apparently have more to worry about than increased exposure to colds or the flu. A new study suggests that attending day care could dramatically increase a child’s chances of becoming obese during childhood.
The study by researchers at the University of Montreal, in Canada, found that children ages 18 months to 4 years old who attend day care on a regular basis or were cared for by an extended family member were 50 percent more likely to be overweight between the ages of 4 to 10 compared to those who stayed at home with their parents, according to the researchers, who conducted the study along with the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre. The results were published in November in the Journal of Pediatrics.
“This difference cannot be explained by known risk factors such as socioeconomic status of the parents, breastfeeding,the body mass index of the mother, or employment status of the mother,” lead researcher Dr. Marie-Claude Geoffroy noted.
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