Infant feeding practices and obesity.

Selected assumptions regarding associations between artificial feeding and infantile obesity are examined. Although some artificial baby foods (desserts, meats, egg yolks) have considerably greater caloric density than breast milk, a large class of baby foods and most milks and formulas are comparable to breast milk in caloric density. The intake of infant foods seems to be related more to caloric density than volume. Modern day artificial feeding in developed countries tends to produce larger weight gains than breast feeding, although no good data exist to evaluate the composition of these weight gains. Many more data from well planned studies are needed to fully elucidate possible mechanisms of infantile obesity.