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Why so many ‘sumo babies’?
When I was pregnant with my first child I distinctly remember people asking if I was ‘eating for two’, and to be honest, before I got pregnant I thought ‘eating for two’ sounded great! My bubble was soon burst when my midwife told me I couldn’t just eat whatever I wanted, and that in fact all I needed was an additional 200 calories a day (about what I’d get from a couple of biscuits), during the last trimester only.
Research over the last few years has shown that mums who are overweight are at higher risk of having an overweight baby and then subsequently an overweight child. Now the National Obesity Forum has released its findings, which showed that obesity levels in children were still worryingly high in the UK.
A mum who is obese is more likely to develop gestational diabetes, which can lead to a higher birth weight. Could this alone be the reason bigger babies are becoming more common? Gestational diabetes is a form of diabetes that occurs only during pregnancy and disappears after pregnancy (although it can be an indicator that the mother has an increased risk of diabetes later in life).
At only 5'2 I’m fairly petite, and I remember friends trying to scare me that I was going to have a big child. By the time I was 8 months pregnant I was terrified of having an 11lb baby. There are already so many things to worry about when you finally get that positive pregnancy test and the size of your baby shouldn’t really be one of them.
Just looking isn’t a reliable way to judge whether a child is healthy or not. Nor does it tell you whether they are breast or bottle-fed or if they get adequate exercise. Some babies are naturally chubbier than others whilst others are much more dinky and this can’t be down to food alone. The genetic makeup of the baby plays a part and that comes from both parents.
But it also comes down to choices mums make when they’re pregnant, especially about diet. It’s pretty well-known that the UK has a weight problem, mostly because unhealthy food is so widely available and so cheap, and because – now that few jobs involve heavy physical work - many of us take less exercise than we should. But the idea of ‘eating for two’ is the sort of advice you’d get from your granny or your great-granny, and stems from days before and during the Second World War when life was harder, mortality was still relatively high among newborns, and ‘eating well’ meant eating a lot of stodgy, high-energy food.
These days though, now we have access to a varied diet at relatively low cost, I reckon we need to put aside some of that old ‘wisdom’. It might have served our grandparents very well, but it just doesn’t fit with the way we live our modern lives. A healthy baby needs a healthy mum, and more mums making wiser decisions about how to eat during pregnancy would soon lead to fewer Sumo babies arriving.
Do you reckon 'sumo babies' are becoming more common? And if so, what should be done about the problem? Tell us what you think!
