Baby Fat Facts

Baby Fat Not Be So Cute After All suggests that all the policy changes aimed at school aged children (reducing access to sugared sodas, revamping school lunches by adding salad bars) may be too little, too late. Research points to evidence that signs of childhood obesity, and the related health problem of diabetes, begin in infancy, even in the womb.

One of the most convincing studies on the link between gestational diabetes in the mother and diabetes in her children was done almost 10 years ago among Pima Indians. Siblings born after the mother developed Type 2 diabetes had a higher body mass index throughout childhood and were almost four times as likely to develop diabetes as siblings born before the diagnosis.

“The intrauterine environment of a woman with diabetes overnourishes the fetus,” said the study’s author, Dana Dabelea, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health. And that, she added, may “reset the offspring’s satiety set point, and make them predisposed to eat more.”

There a many reasons that I find this research troubling, especially the ways in which it would be easy to blame fat women for harming their fetuses. In a Left Hand of Darkness sort of way, I could see a time in which fat women of breeding age were locked up into prison and made lose weight to insure a healthy, non-fat next generation.

But for some reason, in a non-logical tangential step sort of way, the idea that the battle to not be fat starts in the womb, that restraint and lack of restraint are issues from before birth, makes me think of Virno's equation of the dangerousness of humans with our capacity to innovate (Virno, 20).