Many new mothers come to dread the arcane growth charts produced by baby clinics to assess whether their new arrival is being under or overfed.
Now research is beginning to confirm what many mothers have long suspected – that the most commonly used growth charts, based on babies fed high-protein formula milk, wrongly classify lean but healthy babies as underweight. What’s more, by encouraging mothers to overfeed their babies, the charts may be setting perfectly healthy children on the path to obesity.
The most popular growth chart, produced by the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), has been used for…
