An issue of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics reports a very interesting study (Pool Di Sliva 2010) It was a large scale investigation of children who were growing up in homes in which the adults smoked compared with children growing up in a smoke-free environment.

Our first son had asthma from birth. He was born in Denver Colorado where he received excellent pediatric care from a single pediatrician. We moved to Rochester New York when he was six and we immediately made an appointment with a highly recommended pediatric group. When I took him for his first visit, I was immediately put off by the large scale office arrangement. We were ushered into a train like corridor of small waiting rooms, and left there.

It is fairly well established now that it is a person’s total number of fat cells which determine the ease or difficulty of maintaining a healthy body weight. It has also been demonstrated that this number is established early in life and is directly related to the child’s body weight. In practice this means that an overweight child is going to have many more fat cells for life than is a child of normal weight.

Bad habits are hard to break, and this is particularly true when such habits acquired at an early age. That appears to be what is happening to the eating habits of infants in the United States. In a sample of 120,680 children under the age of six, the researchers found that children under the age of six, particularly infants were more overweight than children of a similar age even two decades earlier.

 “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is the sudden, unexpected death of an infant under 1 year of age. SIDS is sometimes called “crib death” because the death occurs when a baby is sleeping in a crib. It is the major cause of death of babies from one month to 1 year of age. Death is sudden and unpredictable: in most cases the baby seems healthy. Death occurs quickly, usually during sleep time.