When energy intake is restricted, weight decreases, but as the body’s systems work more slowly and try to conserve energy, a “cascade of physiological reactions” occurs and the body returns to its original size.
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Restrictions and diets also impair children’s innate ability to regulate their appetite, he adds.
Dr Terri-Lynne South, Head of Obesity Management at the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, agrees.
“I think we focus way too much on a healthy weight range,” says South, adding that “additional dangers” of a restrictive diet mentality include lifelong poor body image and poor eating habits.
Children grow and develop at different rates. Some children have already put on extra fat before their growth spurt, and children can be petite or taller and still healthy despite being on opposite ends of the curve, South explains, using this analogy: People come in different shapes and sizes, just like different breeds of dogs.
“So you have your little Chihuahuas, your bullmastiffs, your Great Danes, your whippets,” she says. “You can’t control your genes. It’s really about being the healthiest Great Dane or Chihuahua or whippet that you can be.”
Some babies are put on a diet as early as six months of age, says an expert.
Professor Louise Baur, a pediatrician and expert in childhood obesity, adds that monitoring a child’s weight can reveal failure to thrive and is an indicator of health status, but interpretation is important.
“It’s not the actual score that’s important, but the development over time,” she explains. “You want to see that the children are following the percentile lines.”
Baur adds that if the restriction only applies to the consumption of highly processed foods, soft drinks and children’s screen time, “then I would say hallelujah.”
Otherwise, she is “very hesitant” to talk about restrictions, even for a subset of children with significant weight, metabolic or sleep apnea problems who should see a specialist. “I would talk about providing a healthy nutritional environment, healthy exercise and so on.”
According to experts, children can regulate their appetite very well.Credit: Getty Images
Some principles of good health, such as encouraging children to eat more vegetables, exercise more and sleep well, are obvious but are challenging in an environment where children are exposed to unhealthy food advertising and where highly processed foods are affordable, readily available and addictive.
Other principles are less clear.
Despite great health promises, new research shows that commercially prepared infant and young child formulas currently available in Australian supermarkets do not meet World Health Organization recommendations.
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Doron Lavan, a father of three living in Melbourne, says conflicting claims leave parents feeling anxious and guilty.
“A lot of the advice is: ‘If you don’t do this or that, you will be damaged for life,'” says the 35-year-old. “You get stressed and that creates a bad atmosphere around food.”
When a nurse advised him not to give his children 100 percent fruit pouches because they contained too much sugar, he contacted Fuller through a Facebook group and asked for advice.
Parents are often advised to limit fruit, dairy and carbohydrates because they are told they will make them fat, says Fuller, whose new book Healthy parents, healthy children dispels nutritional myths and provides six basics for the healthy upbringing of children.
“That’s crazy,” he says. “If you want to eat six tangerines, that’s perfectly fine. They naturally contain sugar and the fruit is full of fiber and nutrients that make you feel full.”
“We should never focus on a child’s weight. That should never be the goal.”
Obesity expert Dr. Nick Fuller
And provided parents offer their children mostly whole foods, including fruits, dairy products and carbohydrates, they can regulate their appetite very well, he says.
“Some days they eat a lot and the next day they eat a small amount to compensate,” he explains, stressing that it is not necessary to restrict their food intake, but a good rule of thumb is not to eat anything for an hour or two before the main meal.
However, when parents feed their children mostly highly processed foods that are extremely tasty but have little fiber and nutritional value, the child’s hedonic pathway overrides his brain’s ability to regulate appetite.
This is important because the first five years of life are when the neural connections that influence our lifelong eating and activity behavior are built.
One in eight Australian children is obese.Credit: iStock
A quarter of all Australian children are overweight and almost one in eight children are obese. The majority of overweight or obese children will continue to be overweight or obese as adults.
If a child is persistently overweight or obese, habits at home need to be reconsidered.
“But we should never focus on a child’s weight,” says Fuller. “That should never be the goal.”
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