Low-Cal Sweets Might Still Make Kids Obese

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Diet foods and drinks meant to help children control their weight may actually spur overeating and obesity, Canadian researchers say.

The study found that animals learn to associate the taste of food with the amount of caloric energy it provides. The researchers speculate that children who eat low-calorie versions of foods that normally have a high calorie content may develop distorted connections between taste and calorie content, resulting in overeating as the children grow up.

"The use of diet food and drinks from an early age into adulthood may induce overeating and gradual weight gain through the taste conditioning process that we have described," lead author and sociologist Dr. David Pierce, of the University of Alberta, said in a prepared statement.

In a series of experiments published Aug. 8 in the journal Obesity, the researchers found that young rats started to overeat when they received low-calorie food and drink. Adolescent rats did not overeat when given low-calorie items.

This may be because, unlike the younger rats, the adolescent rats didn't rely on taste-related cues to assess the caloric energy content of their food, the researchers said.

"Based on what we've learned, it is better for children to eat healthy, well-balanced diets with sufficient calories for their daily activities rather than low-calorie snacks or meals," Pierce said.

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Weight bias may harm obese children

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The stigma that society attaches to obesity can cause children immediate, and possibly lasting, harm, according to a research review.

Overweight children and teens are commonly teased or ostracized by their peers, and sometimes treated differently by teachers and even parents. This, the review shows, can lead to low self-esteem, poor school performance, avoidance of physical activity and, in the most serious cases, depression and suicide.

Research has long demonstrated the weight bias that heavy children face. In a classic 1961 study, 640 subjects between 10 and 11 years old were shown six pictures of other children their age: one child was overweight; one was normal-weight; and four had some form of physical disability.

When the study participants were asked to rank the children in the order of whom they would like to be friends with, they ranked the overweight child last.

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Early, Quality Child Care Linked to Less Depression

Children of low income families benefit from quality educational child care as the involvement appears to protect children against the negative effects of their home environments.

The early intervention, for young children from infancy to age 5, appears to make a difference in decreasing symptoms of depression in early adulthood.

The report, from the FPG Child Development Institute (FPG) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, uses data from the Abecedarian Project, a longitudinal study begun in 1972 in which 111 high-risk children were randomly assigned to early educational child care from infancy to age 5 or to a control group that received various other forms of child care.

The study is published in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

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