Weighing the evidence

My daughter is now eating all low-fat or non-fat dairy - the food group she most loves, after cupcakes! I'm still trying to get a handle on whether she's a healthy weight; she might be a little over. I certainly don't want to instill in her any obsession over her weight - more than she's going to get anyway, as a girl in our culture. But I do want to give her good habits. She loves fruits and veggies, so I encourage that. And the low-fat no-fat stuff is invisible to her.

I also try to give her "real" food for meals. This means I sometimes still feed her dinner before my husband and I eat; I've found that if I try to make her wait til dinner's ready for us all, and we're ready to eat (around 7 pm), she sometimes just snacks on junk and doesn't eat dinner at all. But sometimes, she manages to wait. I guess the difference is whether her nap is early enough that she can have a snack before 5 pm; then she can make it til family dinner time.

A couple of days ago, I searched for information about kids' body-mass index (BMI) - the real measure of whether a person is overweight. Apparently, a healthy BMI for kids is lower than it is for adults - a bit surprising, because BMI is the ratio of weight to (the square of) height. It's also different for boys and girls, whereas adult BMI ranges for healthy, overweight, and obese are the same for men and women.

So, I plugged in my daughter's digits. I used the CDC's calculator, which seems the most accurate - it asks both the kid's current age and the age at measurement, allows fractions of measurements, and considers whether the kid is a boy or a girl.

I found that if I used the numbers from her 2-year doctor's visit, she's slightly overweight, but if I use the same weight they measured, but the 1/2 inch taller height that I very carefully measured right after the visit (using a ruler, with her feet as flat as I could get them to be, and measuring twice, as opposed to the quick hand on the head the nurse used) - then, according to the CDC, she's a healthy weight.

My conclusion: I don't think these BMI figures can be very accurate for 2-year-olds. How many two-year-olds do you know who will stand still long enough to allow an accurate height measurement, especially during a busy doctor's visit? And if the difference between normal weight and overweight is only a half inch of height, then there's a huge potential for misclassification.

Have you ever wondered whether your kid was overweight? Was the pediatrician helpful? Ours was quite relaxed, just saying to go with the lower-fat milk for now - but that was at 18 months, when all the information I was reading said to stick with full-fat milk til age two, because of brain development. He said it didn't really matter by 18 months, and that too many kids already have atherosclerosis (cholesterol buildup in the arteries). I ended up switching her to 2% about a month later, to 1% a little after age 2, and now to fat-free. I still wonder whether I needed to do all that, and whether I need to worry about it now.