Abstract:

Introduction: Obesity in childhood is not only isolated to obesity in adulthood but it also aggravates physical complication later in life. One of the simple strategies for prevention of pediatric obesity is breastfeeding in infancy period.

Objective: This study aimed to determine the relationship between milk feeding pattern and preschool children’s weight.

Methods: This study is a retrospective case-control. For data collection, a questionnaire, meter and scale was used. In this study the case groups were obese children and the control groups were children with normal weight. Sample size was 120 that were selected by cluster randomized method. Researcher selected the sample by reporting to day care centers affiliated to Behzisti and 60 obese and 60 normal weight children were chosen after their age, sex, height, weight and BMI was measured. According to the definition of this study, children with BMI more the 85 percentile based on age and sex were considered obese.

Results: The results indicated that there was a significant difference between milkfeeding pattern during infancy and obese, and normal weight children (P<0.001). But there was no significant difference between timing of introduction of solid foods. But there was a significant difference between daily TV watching (P<0.001), mother’s BMI (P<0.001) and birth weight (P<0.003) in two groups.

Conclusion: This survey indicated that milkfeeding pattern differed significantly between obese and normal weight children, also after adjusting demographic characteristics, milkfeeding pattern was significant, thus milkfeeding pattern along with demographic characteristics effects children’s weight.

Key words: Body Mass Index, Body weight, Breast feeding, Children, Obesity