Hi Judy, 
Obesity as an infant problem isn't new.  I came across some alarmingly high
weights of babies of 9 months and other ages in the letters pages of an
Australian women's magazine in 1928, while doing my PhD thesis a few years
ago.  At one stage readers were vying with each other to give details of the
fattest babies they had seen.  Examples:
1. Winner of the baby show held by a local branch of the School for Mothers
Institute and Baby Health Centre in South Australia, this baby girl weighed
in at 36 pounds (about 16.4 kg) at 9 months.
2. A Queensland girl who weighed 23 lb (10.45 kg) at 3 months and 46 3/4 lb
(21.25 kg) at 9 months.
3. Baby girl who was already overweight at 4 months (no weight cited) and
who was 42 lbs at 12 months.
There were other examples, but these are the ones that stood out. The nurses
who supervised and advised on infant feeding generally didn't encourage
obesity, though the fact that the winner of a baby show conducted by a baby
health centre was so obese shows that some in the health services approved,
at least in that area.
Advertisements for a popular arrowroot food given to babies promoted the
product as a "baby fattener", an effective way of making sales at that time.
Fatness was still considered laudable.  The same product had a long-running
series of ads with pictures of fat babies or children "reared on" the
product. 
From personal memory (and not from my research) in the late-1960s I remember
seeing some very obese, inactive babies in prams whenever I was in town. It
was the era of very early pureed "meals" and artificial baby milk in
bottles, at least for top-ups, and some of the babies I saw round town
looked too full to move.
Virginia

Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA 
Brisbane, Qld, Australia 
E: [log in to unmask] 
 
Judy LeFan posted the following URL"
_http://www.aolhealth.com/2011/01/03/baby-obesity-epidemic/_
(http://www.aolhealth.com/2011/01/03/baby-obesity-epidemic/) 
 

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