May 31st, 2011

The researchers suggest pediatricians and other health professionals work with parents to find acceptable solutions for stopping bottle use around a child’s first birthday.

An excerpt from Temple University reads:

Experts recommend that by 2 years of age children should not be drinking from a bottle, but a national study led by Temple researchers has found that the practice is still common at that age and further, it could contribute to childhood obesity.

In an article published this month in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers Rachel Gooze, a doctoral candidate in public health, and Robert Whitaker, Professor of Pediatrics and Public Health at the Center for Obesity Research and Education, found that children who were using a bottle at 24 months were approximately 30 percent more likely to be obese at 5.5 years, even after accounting for other factors such as the mother’s weight, the child’s birth weight, and feeding practices during infancy.

The researchers analyzed data from 6,750 children enrolled in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort to determine a link between bottle use at 2 years of age and the risk of obesity at 5.5 years of age. Twenty-two percent of the children were classified as prolonged bottle users — that is, at two years of age, they used a bottle as their primary drink container and/or were put to bed with a calorie-containing bottle.

Read more about this article here.