Temple Univ. Study: Baby Bottles May Make Toddlers Fat
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Giving your toddler a bottle could be making him fat.
Two-year-olds should be off the bottle -- instead using a sippy cup and eating regular meals -- according to Rachel Gooze, a PhD student at Temple University, but 22 percent of them are not.
Gooze and a Temple professor studied data on thousands of toddlers and found that nearly a third who received bottles were likely to be obese just a few years later.
"Prolonged bottle use might lead toddlers to consume more calories than they need," Gooze says, "because at these older ages the bottle is probably used for comfort or convenience rather than nourishment."
She says a regular eight-ounce bottle of whole milk can contain nearly 12 percent of a child's daily caloric intake. Add that to regular snacks and meals, and it's easy to see how the pounds accumulate.
The findings are found in this month's Journal of Pediatrics.
Reported by Lynne Adkins, KYW Newsradio 1060
