Childhood Obesity and Sleep

Childhood obesity associated with lack of adequate night-time sleep.
The CBS Evening News (9/6, story 11, 0:20, Mitchell) reported, "A study out today shows how important an early bedtime can be to a child's waistline. Researchers followed a group of youngsters ages five and under, a quarter of whom slept ten or less hours a night. After five years, four out of five of those kids who slept less had either turned overweight or obese. By the way, napping made no difference either way."
HealthDay (9/6, Preidt) reported that the study included "1,930 US children, ages one month to 13 years, who were divided into two groups -- younger (ages one month to 59 months) and older (ages five to 13 years)." Data on the children "was collected at the start of the study (baseline) in 1997 and again in 2002 (follow-up)."
MedPage Today (9/6, Phend) noted that "for kids four and under, low sleep levels appeared to have a lasting effect," with a "correlation between baseline sleep and overweight or obesity five years later (odds ratio 1.80, P<0.01)." For "kids five to 13, sleep levels had only a current effect" in which "low follow-up sleep levels predicted higher odds of overweight or obesity at follow-up (OR 1.80, P<0.01), although this effect lost significance once baseline BMI was included." The researchers said: "These findings suggest that there is a critical window prior to age five years when nighttime sleep may be important for subsequent obesity status."
The CNN (9/6, Falco) "The Chart" blog reported that "if children are getting less than 10 hours of sleep at night, they are well below the CDC sleep recommendations," which suggest, for example, "that a one-year old baby should sleep 13-15 hours at night," while three- to five- year-olds should sleep "11-13 hours" per night.
Studies link weight gain during pregnancy, overweight kids. The New York Times (9/7, Brody) reports, "Increasing evidence indicates that the trouble often starts in the womb, when women gain more weight than is needed to produce a healthy, full-size baby." Excessive weight gain "in pregnancy, recent findings show, can result in bigger-than-average babies who are prenatally programmed to become overweight children - who, in turn, are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease and cancer later in life." While genes "play a role in weight issues for some people, recent studies indicate that genetics is not the main reason babies are born too fat. Rather, the new evidence suggests that in addition to gaining significantly more weight than is recommended during pregnancy, more women now start out fatter before they become pregnant."