The weight debate goes on…
The association between Body Mass Index (BMI) and child development has been recently investigated in over seven and a half thousand South Australian children at school entry. Unlike many previous studies which combined groups of both thin and healthy weight children as the baseline, this study differentiated between thinness and healthy weight. It found there to be no discernible differences in the physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and communication development of thin children as compared to their healthy-weight peers.
In addition, the findings indicated that only obese (and not overweight) children, who were researched at a mean age of 4.8 years, were more developmentally vulnerable, when measured a few months later. Specifically, obese children were approximately 30% more likely to be vulnerable in terms of social competence. Also, obese children were found to be more than twice as likely to be developmentally vulnerable in the physical domain compared to healthy-weight children. It looks as though one extreme is worse than the other, in terms of developmental vulnerability, when it comes to BMI.