Fat Babies Unhealthy.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXI, Issue X, 5 September 1903, Page 711

Fat Babies Unhealthy.

Peril" lurk in tat baby competitions. *• n I obesity in infants is not a thing to b? desired. A competition recently h 11 at Walthamstow. England, engages the attention and provokes the a arm of a writei in the •‘Lancet.” It is impossible, he says, to doubt the mischievous effect of such SLOWS. At the Walthamstow show nearly fifty babies, four months old. competed, and the winter turned the scale at 1641b*. All very amusing, no doubt, bat the medical authority points out that there is a tragic side to the baby show that is little "iispected by doting mothers. Obesity in infants is not synonymous with health. On the contrary, it is a matter of clinical experience that a fat baby i- unhealthy, with little resistance

to <li*ea-e. ami likely to *iicciinib on the least provocation to any of the so-called minor ailment -of infancy. Baby >hows, tleiefore, do harm by acting a* direct iiu ucement«• to over-feeding with foods which fatten but do not produce *ound. healthy ti—ue*. The appearance of these carliohydrate. or sugar-fed. infant* is highly characteristic. There i* "a curiously translucent and almost opal-e-<vnt appearance of the tissues: they ar* hypertrophic square-headed infants, aand to the touch they are cold, gelatinous. and flabby, with none of the elasticity and tone which characterise the ti>-ue* of the vigorous, healthy, breastfed infant.” Yet it is these sugar-fed, gelatinous babies who receive the prize* at infant shows, and are held up b> their proud parents as paragons of vigorous babyhood! Prizes at baby shows should, say- the ■'Lancet.” be awarded, not to the fattest, but to the medically finest babies. Then, pel haps, “the minds of mothers would be disabused of many of their misconceptions. and among others of their admiration for the hypertrophic pathological types which Raphael and others among the great masters have perpetuated on canvas as pleasing standard* of vigorous babyhood to be copied and admired.”