Spending too much time with the bottle can make you overweight, according to a new a study ?– the baby bottle, that is. Babies who use a bottle as their primary means of sustenance past their first year of life could be at increased risk for becoming obese children. Bottle feeding is convenient for many parents who lack the time, energy or resources to fully wean toddlers onto solid foods. Additionally, bottles are comforting to many children, and parents often put their kids to bed with a bottle to help them sleep. As children grow older — say, 12 to 14 months — bottle feeding becomes less a nutritional necessity than an easy routine.
“Bottle use at this age is more about convenience and comfort,” said Rachel Gooze, a graduate student studying public health at Temple University in Philadelphia and one of the new study’s co-authors.
For years dentists have warned parents that too much bottle feeding can lead to tooth decay in their children, as prolonged contact between liquids like milk, formula and juice and the bacteria on the teeth can lead to bacterial infection.
Some scientists also noticed another trend: Babies who bottle fed well past their first birthdays tended to grow into heavier children.
While some preliminary studies have looked into the trend and found evidence to suggest the pattern is real, they’ve mostly been too small or demographically narrow to say whether the observation holds true for the population at large.
Gooze, along with Temple pediatrician Robert Whitaker and Ohio State University epidemiologist Sarah Anderson, wanted to find out, so they turned to data from a large national study that follows children born in 2001.
The researchers looked at bottle use and health data from 6,750 children and classified 22 percent of them as prolonged bottle users, meaning that by the time they turned 2, they either still used a bottle as their primary drink container, went to bed with a bottle, or both.
Of those prolonged bottle users, 23 percent were obese by the time they were 5 1/2 years old, compared to 16 percent of children who stopped using a bottle before their second birthday. Overall, kids who still used a bottle at age 2 were about 30 percent more likely to be obese by 5 1/2 than other children. The researchers reported their results this week in the Journal of Pediatrics.
How could bottle feeding lead to obesity? Gooze said that an average 8-ounce bottle of milk contains about 150 calories. When bottles are given to comfort children rather than feed them, that can mean excess calories if children have already consumed plenty that day, she said. That’s also true for children who go to bed with a bottle, Gooze said, as parents rarely think about that nighttime bottle as additional calories on top of what they consumed during the day.
Karen Bonuck, a professor of family medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, said the study is useful because it’s the first to show that this is a populationwide trend. “This is a nationally representative study and that’s very important,” she said.
Bonuck’s own team is in the process of figuring out how prolonged bottle feeding might affect children’s eating habits as they develop, contributing to their risk for obesity beyond just direct calorie intake.
Gooze recommends that even before children begin to wean, parents consult their pediatricians to develop a plan for transitioning from liquids to solids and don’t fall back on the bottle just because it’s convenient. The transition from drinking from a bottle to sipping from a cup can be difficult, she said, but it’s as important as moving from crawling to walking. “Parents should think of it as a developmental milestone,” she said.
babies,bottle feeding,obesity,pediatrics
