American Children Getting Too Fat For Car Safety Seats

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Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Also Included In: Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness;  Sports Medicine / Fitness;  Nutrition / Diet
Article Date: 03 Apr 2006 - 15:00 PST

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Over 250,000 American children under the age of 6 are too heavy for car-safety seats designed for their age-group. Makers of car-safety seats are having to make sturdier models to ensure levels of safety for these seriously obese and overweight children are maintained.

As the American obesity epidemic gains pace and spreads through all age groups, the number of children under 6 who are obese is growing at an alarming rate.

Standard safety-seats are designed for children who weigh less than 40 pounds. Most of the children who were found to be over the limit were three years old. For a three-year-old to weigh over that amount he/she is either incredibly tall or seriously overweight.

Researchers at a Safety Center, John Hopkins Hospital, said if a child weighs more than the seat's weight limit the risks of injury during a car accident are much greater.

Lead researcher Lara Trifiletti said she and her colleagues began to notice that more and more children were very obese and their car-seat technicians were finding it hard to provide car seats to fit them.

(Although Lara Trifiletti worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the time of the research, she now works at The Children's Research Institute, Ohio University).

Of the children found to be too heavy for their car seats, 190,000 were 3 years old.

You can read about this study in the journal Pediatrics (April).

3-year-olds are not mature enough (or tall enough) for booster seats, which can be used for slightly older children (booster seats use the car's seat belts).

Five years ago 23% of American children between the ages of two and five were overweight, 10% were obese. The figures today are expected to be higher.

In the nineties, new diet movements blamed the introduction of high carb diets during the seventies for the growth in obesity and overweight in the USA.

Several options for weight control have been present in the USA for the last ten years. Different diets, such as Atkins, The Zone, The South Beach have been around for over a decade now. The increase in obesity over the last ten years has still been accelerating despite new diets being introduced and having had a while to prove themselves nationally.

Many write in to Medical News Today stressing that the focus in the USA has been too much on what people should eat, rather than how much exercise people do. What's the good of telling people to eat steaks and salads (low carb), or keep their total calories down, or eat less fat, or cut down on sugars, if they can't keep it up for more than a year or so.

As one lady from Kansas said:

'Our family, me, my husband and our two 10-year-old children, all used to be overweight. We tried every diet - low carb, high carb, low fat, high fat, everything. They all worked for a bit, then the weight came back on. We then decided to go for speedwalking. We have been speedwalking for 60 minutes a day, the whole family together, for one year now. The weight has come off, and stayed off. Diets work, but not for long. Exercise is easier to sustain if you choose something that is not too strenuous. We decided on walking as that was something we could all do - rather than anything too hard. And it has worked for us. If I had a three-year-old now I would take a stroller and have the child walk part of the way - we could all slow down for him.'

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today