Does My Child have Baby Fat or Real Fat?

Here's the short answer:  The answer partly depends on the parents.  

​A study of 854 Washington state children under 3 years old showed that a child is nearly three times likely to grow up obese if one of his parents are obese. If you are overweight, your child has a 65-75% chance of growing up to be overweight.[i]
 
So, is that little paunch on your 4th grader baby fat?  
 
Not if you are sporting the same paunch.

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References

Excerpted from the American Dietetic Association’s excellent book, Dieting for Dummies (Wiley, 2004).

​Bevelander, Kirsten E., Kirsikka Kaipainen, Robert Swain, Simone Dohle, Josh C. Bongard,Paul D. H. Hines, and Brian Wansink (2014), “Crowdsourcing Novel Childhood Predictors of Adult Obesity,” PLOS ONE, 9:2, e87756.

​From Bevelander, Kirsten E., Kirsikka Kaipainen, Robert Swain, Simone Dohle, Josh C. Bongard,Paul D. H. Hines, and Brian Wansink (2014), “Crowdsourcing Novel Childhood Predictors of Adult Obesity,” PLOS ONE, 9:2, e87756.

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