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Does fat intake explain fatness in healthy children?

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 56, pages 1046–1047 (2002)Cite this article

The prevalence of obesity in children and adults is increasing worldwide and obesity has become one of the most common nutritional and general health problems in almost all age groups. Among the environmental influences on body weight regulation, fat intake in daily diet is discussed to play an important role (Jéquier, 2001). In a recent paper in the June 2001 issue of Eur. J. Clin. Nutr., Magarey et al presented results of a longitudinal analysis in healthy children showing that fat and other macronutrient intakes (energy adjusted) appear not be important determinants of weight gain during growth. However, the few results hitherto available from longitudinal studies are conflicting (Rolland-Cachera et al, 1995, Robertson et al, 1999).

Ideally, this question could be more directly addressed by studying such children who, over the long-term, prefer a high fat intake and compare them with long-term low fat consumers. Magerey et al (2001) tried to apply a corresponding approach but they were unable to find an appropriate number of subjects with either consistently high or low fat intakes over years (as estimated from 3 to 4-day weighed diet records). When examining the 3-day weighed diet records (Kersting et al, 1998), collected for more than a decade, in our ongoing observational DONALD (Dortmund Nutritional and Anthropometric Longitudinally Designed) Study it became clear that this direct procedure was also not possible within our data set. Nevertheless, in order to recheck whether fat intake (energy-related) might contribute to an elevated weight gain over years we chose an alternative approach whereby we specifically looked for intakes of children who either stay lean or have an above-average increase in BMI during prepuberty.

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  1. Research Institute of Child Nutrition, Dortmund, 44225, Germany

    T Remer, T Dimitriou & M Kersting

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  1. T Remer
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  2. T Dimitriou
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  3. M Kersting
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Remer, T., Dimitriou, T. & Kersting, M. Does fat intake explain fatness in healthy children?. Eur J Clin Nutr 56, 1046–1047 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejcn.1601434

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