Perambulator to Grave

Everybody loves a chubby baby--but is a chubby baby necessarily the healthiest and destined to live longest? Probably not, and especially if the chubbiness persists through adolescence, suggests Antioch College's Anthropologist Stanley M. Garn in a study for the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth. In fact, the increase of overeating and obesity in childhood leads Garn to ask: "Are we eating our way to the cemetery beginning in the perambulator?"

Highly fattening food is now generally and easily available to the vast majority of U.S. youngsters, Garn notes. As calories have become more accessible and irresistible, the chances to work them off in healthy exercise have diminished. "In many of our great cities," he writes, "safe opportunities for strenuous play now scarcely exist . . . As suburbia expands . . . the car pool and the school bus reduce the energy expenditure, and the ranch house no longer provides calorie-expending stairs to climb."

Of overweight children studied in one community, 80% became overweight adults--and adult obesity goes with increased liability to heart-and-artery disease. In fact, says Garn, the American child's diet, sometimes characterized as "one big milk shake," is perilously akin to a diet used by medical researchers to create death-dealing obesity in rats. He concludes: "Frappes, fat-meat hamburgers, bacon-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, followed by ice cream, may be good for the farmer, good for the undertaker, and bad for the populace."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.