A few years ago Danone achieved a slogan that was engraved in the memory of many: "They gave me two." In an announcement of his Petit Suisse He managed to make many people believe that the growth of their children depended on what they ate and not only that, he got parents to offer their children not one, but two containers of the product.
A similar strategy is carried out by the manufacturers of baby milk by calling baby milk from 12 months "growing milk", as if by adding more calcium, more vitamins and more of many things children would be Taller. Well hala, there we have hundreds of mothers and fathers giving this milk thinking that they will grow more.
But this is not all. In many medical consultations, and I speak of the pediatrician or the nurse, you can go with your baby and receive, after weighing and measuring it, a "we are going to supplement the breast with a bottle" or a "we are going to start with the porridge" because "it is low height. " And this is very surprising because it has been known for a long time that the height of the children depends almost exclusively on the height of the parents.
Impossible to know how much your child will measure
That does not bother me, that I always answer all the questions, but it is impossible to know. Many mothers and fathers, when I do the review of their babies (as always, in case someone does not know me, I remember that I am a pediatric nurse), they ask me how much will your child measure, if you can already know, if it will be very high, if it will stay short.
The reality is that yes, it is very difficult to know how much your child will measure, because children do not follow a predefined pattern, despite the fact that in the tables the height goes even to a certain percentile, and the other reality is that the easiest way to knowing how much a child will measure is simply look at the height of the parents. If both parents are short, the logical thing is that the children are short. If both are tall, the logical thing is that they are tall.
The pediatrician who worried about the height of my children without looking at the parents
And this reminds me of the pediatrician who took my children when they were young, that one after another worried because they were around the 3rd percentile or did not reach him. Come on, they were the shortest by age. I don't reach the seventy meter and my wife is shorter than me. When the pediatrician made a face of "I don't know what to do with this child" she and I looked at each other and in the end we confessed that "is that we do not expect him to be very tall ... we are not worried because we are not a big deal either."
Height is one of the characteristics of the people that most have to do with inheritance
Our appearance depends largely on the genes. The color of the skin, hair, height, complexion. The weight? Yes, partly yes, but then it depends on what each child eats. The temper? Also, since each child is born with his own character and way of being, but I think we all agree that the life he leads will modify much, much, his way of behaving and being.
However, the height does not vary so much, not to say that almost nothing varies. A recent study says that they have discovered that there are twice the genes related to the height of the people they thought. That is height is associated more in genetic inheritance than was known (which was already a lot).
To achieve this discovery hundreds of researchers have analyzed genetic data from more than 250,000 people and one of the researchers, Joel Hirschhorn, of the Boston Pediatric Hospital, said the following:
Height is almost completely determined by genetics, but our previous studies had only been able to explain about 10 percent of that genetic influence.
That is to say, there is still much to explain, but they are becoming clearer every day that the amount of food a child eats will not determine their height.
And the "eat, you will not grow"?
For that, it is confirmed that neither "they gave me two" is true nor is it "eat or you will stay small" that every mother has ever told her son. A child has to eat what he has to eat, neither more nor less. And the one who knows how much he needs is him (or her). Neither the mother, nor the father nor the pediatrician knows it, so as long as the weight is well (that weight is rising more or less correlatively to the height), what you eat will be enough.
If we manage to force the child to eat, if we manage to make him believe that he has to eat more to grow more and ends up eating more than he needs we will achieve that measure the same thing I was going to measure, but weigh more.
Come on, that if you have a short, thin child and you stuff it with food you will get it changed. It will go from being short and thin to being short and overweight. And if you go over, short and fat. And that's not the idea, right?
Photos | Thinkstock
In Babies and more | How and how much a child grows during childhood (I), Interpretation of weight and growth charts by Carlos González (I) and (II)
