Disease Proof : Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

A popular headline kicking around the news today is the claim that breastfeeding won’t prevent children from becoming fat. Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press reports:

While breast-feeding has many benefits, it won't prevent a child from becoming fat as an adult, says a new study that challenges dogma from U.S. health officials.


The research is the largest study to date on breast-feeding and its effect on adult obesity.

"I'm the first to say breast-feeding is good. But I don't think it's the solution to reducing childhood or adult obesity," said the study's lead author, Karin Michels of Harvard Medical School.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promotes breast-feeding as a way to reduce children's excess weight, and the guidelines for federal chronic disease prevention grants to states call for breast-feeding promotion. Some health officials say 15 to 20 percent of obesity could be prevented through breast-feeding.

Now, this one kind of stumped me. I didn’t know how to react, so, I asked the man. Here’s what Dr. Fuhrman had to say about the research—the word blunt, comes to mind. Take a look:

So what? Why would we expect early life breast feeding to make us immune to eating the American junk food diet? You are what you eat and everything that goes into your mouth makes a difference. Nature is not that forgiving. You develop diseases down the road from the poor food choices you made at an earlier time.

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Last week Diet-Blog offered up some suggestions to help you lose weight and stay healthy. This week The Cancer Blog has got seven helpful tips to prime your kids. Here’s a couple that caught my eye:

Let 'em see you sweat
You need to keep moving too. Not only for your own well-being -- that's obvious -- but so your kids see your physical activity as a staple of healthy living. Teach your kids to do push-ups and sit-ups and do them together. Jump rope, run laps at a local track, ride bikes, or dance. Just don't expect your kids to stay active if your idea of exercise is flipping through TV channels.


No double standards
We simply cannot say one thing and do another. Smoking while preaching the dangers of the habit just doesn't make sense. Saying "no" to sweets with your hand in the cookie jar is downright unfair. Carrying around extra weight and demanding physical fitness is simply ineffective. So make a commitment to yourself and your kids that you will do as you say. It's the only way.

Now, I isolated these tips because they require two-fold commitment, by you and your kids. After all, the best to lead to is by example. Trust me. The overweight high school gym teacher is no health and fitness remodel.

Dr. Fuhrman also believes in this dual commitment. Check out this secret from Dr. Fuhrman’s Secrets to Getting Your Children to Eat Healthfully:

If you, as parents, do not demonstrate proper respect for your own bodies by eating healthy, exercising regularly, and engaging in other healthful lifestyle practices, don't expect your children to do any better than you, now or in the future.

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