Lack Of Sleep In Infancy Could Make Children Obese

Babies who don’t get enough sleep may be at greater risk of becoming obese early in life. A study conducted showed a link between lack of sleep in infancy and becoming obese around age seven. To prove it, scientists analyzed the habits of over one thousand children in Massachusetts at various points in their development. At age seven, the doctors then did a measurement of the children’s height, weight, body and abdominal fat.

The Boston Globe reports that children who were found to have the poorest sleep habits had a tendency to be more obese than children on the higher end of sleep habits. Does this mean that your bouncing baby could be getting chubby later in life because he doesn’t sleep through the night? You may want to work on better sleep habits, but considering the research method here involved surveys, the results should be taken with a grain of salt . The survey relied heavily on the words of mothers of the children and not an actual study conducted giving accurate results.

This opens up a wide range of variables that could fudge up the numbers. The definition of “not sleeping a lot” could vary from mother to mother, as could the timetable between when the doctor asks and when the instance is occurring. Most, if not all babies, have trouble sleeping at some stage in their development, so a baby could have a bad streak of waking up just prior to visiting the doctor and then be a sound sleeper right after. If so, the numbers do nothing to reflect or show that. That being said the number of surveyed provides a little weight. So, it's certainly worth doing more research.

While these numbers may or may not be skewed, there’s no denying the CDC showing that childhood obesity has doubled in the past thirty years. This could be linked to the fact that American obesity has more than quadrupled since then. Yeah, it would appear we are all getting fatter as time continues, so maybe we should go easier on our kids. After all the children are our future...our big old super sized future.