By Eulalee Thompson 
Round, plump babies, in our culture, will always attract the admiration of adults. "Oh, aren't they fat and healthy-looking," they would say. But are chubby babies really healthier than slim ones?
VOICE QUIVERING at the edge of tears, a young mother, Janet, says that her baby is the thinnest of all the babies in her neighbourhood. The baby's paediatrician says that she is thriving well, but the other mothers say that the baby is not well. The young mother feels embarrassed; as if her baby is malnourished.
Paediatricians say that this is a common concern among mothers in Jamaica slim babies are thought to be sick and malnourished, chubby babies are seen as healthy.
"Babies born small tend to track small," said president of the Paediatric Association of Jamaica, Dr. Minerva Thames. Furthermore, she says, that if the mommy and daddy are small, then paediatricians wouldn't expect the baby to be fat, since there is some genetic association.
Babies are tracked on a height and weight chart (or a growth chart) that compares their growth to a standard range. Height, weight, sometimes head circumference are measured. These parameters are set against the baby's age and results are reported in percentiles of average. For examples, a child at the 75th percentile indicates that about 25 per cent of children his age and gender are heavier and about 75 per cent of children are lighter.
"We look for babies who cross the percentiles, this tips us off that something must be going on. But, we are not concerned if the baby continues to grow around the same percentile," Dr. Thames said.
Dr. Thames' response would bring comfort to parents of slim babies but does the size of one's baby really matter? Mushrooming childhood obesity is leading more researchers to ponder this question.
Researchers at the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute (CFNI), say that several studies have shown a weak relation between being heavy at birth and becoming overweight in later life. However, the CFNI points to a large British birth cohort study by Parsons et al which followed babies to age 33 and found that "the positive relation between birth weight and later body mass index is largely accounted for by maternal weight. Heavier mothers have heavier babies who tend to become heavier adults." In that study, the father's weight did not appear to influence the risk of adult obesity in children.
The CFNI also reports that children who grow rapidly during childhood are more likely to be obese as adults and that many of these children would also have been heavy at birth. Early childhood therefore becomes a critical period for the development of obesity.
Further research by CFNI (Xuereb et al) says that "young adult obesity is associated with child obesity...and this risk increases when the mother or father of the obese child was also obese."
The Caribbean has one of the highest incidences of obesity in pre-school children averaging between three and six per cent. In Jamaica, six per cent of pre-school children are overweight compared to Barbados 3.9 per cent; St. Lucia 2.5 per cent and Trinidad and Tobago - three per cent.
The health concern is that overweight children may be at greater risk for the chronic lifestyle illnesses, such as diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases. U.S. studies say that 61 per cent of overweight children (aged 5 to 15) have one or more cardiovascular risk factors and 27 per cent of them have two or more.
