New Research Released About Food Restriction, Pressure and Kids

It seems like you can’t turn a corner nowadays without being bombarded with messages about the obesity epidemic. This fear around obesity seems to be one of the reasons parents have started to police their kids’ food. They think that policing helps them, but recent research has shown that this is not the case. In a recent study published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, they looked at diverse population (racially/ethnically and socioeconomically) of 2231 adolescents and 3431 parents of those adolescents to explore parent behaviors surrounding both food restriction and pressure to eat. Here are a few of their findings: Mean food restriction was significantly higher among parents of overweight and obese adolescents compared with nonoverweight adolescents Mean pressure-to-eat was significantly higher among nonoverweight adolescents. No significant interactions by race/ethnicity or household income were found in the relationship between pressure-to-eat or restriction and adolescent weight status. The authors also suggest that “the relationship between parental restriction and child weight status is likely to be bidirectional” and that “results from a small number of studies indicate that parental restriction often precedes excess weight in young children, suggesting that the bidirectional path begins with parental use of controlling feeding practices; this exposure then leads to weight gain over time for th...
Source: Balanced Health and Nutrition Rebecca Scritchfield's Blog - Category: Nutritionists and Food Scientists Authors: Tags: children eating healthy life nutrition kids mindful eating research Source Type: blogs