Thousands of women are inadvertently overfeeding their babies because ministers and health advisers have delayed the introduction of new child growth charts. The charts, produced by the World Health Organisation (WHO), have been available for more than a year, but the Government has made no decision on when to introduce them, Tam Fry said.  The new charts are based exclusively on breast-fed babies, who grow more slowly in the first year of life.  The charts currently in use classify many breast-fed babies as underweight, encouraging their mothers to take to bottle-feed-ing.  This helped to create overweight children and to fuel the obesity epidemic, Mr Fry said.

“Ministers keep on saying breast is best but they’ve done nothing about it,” Mr Fry said. “It wouldn’t cost them a brass farthing – the charts are free. We’ve had two committees who have spent a year not making up their minds. Finally they resorted to a public consultation. Now that has finished and still the Department of Health has no idea when a decision will be made.”

 

Health experts and nutritionists welcomed the charts, which are based on a study of 8,500 breast-fed babies in Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the US between 1997 and 2003.  The difference between these and the existing charts, which were based on Britain’s experience before 1990 and were weighted towards bottle-fed babies, is striking.  Breast-fed babies have a growth spurt in the early weeks and are ahead of the growth chart at 12 weeks. But then they start to put on weight more slowly so that at 52 weeks the average breast-fed baby is about half a kilogram – more than 1lb – lighter than the chart indicates.

 

“Introducing these charts will shift a quarter of the babies from below the average weight at one year to above the average weight,” Mr Fry said. “It means that many fewer babies will be referred for ‘failure to thrive’ and lots of women will go on breast-feed-ing longer, because they won’t be discouraged.”  The evidence is that breast-fed babies are less likely to become overweight infants, so a rise in breast-feeding is likely to have an impact on obesity.

 

A joint expert group from the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was set up by the department to give advice.  It concluded that the WHO study “provides a hitherto unsurpassed foundation for a growth standard being based on healthy children living in conditions that favoured the achievement of full genetic potential”.  The variations between countries in the study were insignificant, so the charts would be representative of babies in Britain.

 

Last month Bert Koletzko, a researcher from the University of Munich, told a conference in Budapest that the old growth charts “have skewed infant nutrition towards overfeeding for decades”.  Peter Aggett, of the University of Lancaster, a member of the expert group that reviewed the WHO charts, said that mothers who were told about the new charts were relieved because they were often pressured by health visitors to feed their babies more.

 

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: “The expert group hopes to issue recommendations to UK health departments by the end of June.”