ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 15, 1996 TAG: 9610150113
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BRECKENRIDGE, COLO.
SOURCE: Associated Press
COMPUTERIZED BOTTLES caught them in the act - sucking 50 percent faster than other infants.
People who are likely to get fat may show the first signs of what's to come when they are just 3 months old, doctors have found. Even then, they really love to eat.
Using a special computerized bottle, the researchers discovered that babies with overweight mothers exhibit what they politely call a ``vigorous feeding style.''
Simply put, they suck more aggressively.
People inherit a tendency to be fat or thin. Appetite, willingness to exercise and metabolic rate - the amount of calories one burns when doing nothing - all run in families.
No one knows, though, just how much obesity comes from children imitating their parents' unhealthy eating and exercise habits and how much is wired into the genes at birth.
That's what makes the study of infants so interesting to researchers. It's unlikely that in the first months of life they have already picked up their parents' attitudes toward food.
Dr. Robert Berkowitz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania studied 39 babies whose mothers were average weight and 40 whose mothers were obese. The babies with the fat mothers were considered to be at high risk of developing obesity themselves someday.
The mothers fed the babies with a bottle that was wired to a computer to record the number of times they sucked during their meal. Berkowitz described the results Sunday at a meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity.
Berkowitz found that the high-risk babies sucked 930 times during their feeding - 50 percent more than the other infants. They sucked an average of 45 times a minute, compared with 36 times for the others.
The high-risk babies also consumed about 20 percent more formula and, by age 1, had started to put on more weight.
Dr. William Dietz of Tufts Medical School in Boston questioned the significance of the infants' robust sucking, since larger babies clearly need more food. ``I would expect that bigger infants would suck more to feed more because they are bigger,'' he said.
The study's ultimate goal, Berkowitz said, is to find an early warning signal of obesity. ``We want to identify people early so we can come in with ways of prevention.''
LENGTH: Medium: 54 linesby CNB