It may be time to examine your kids' fears and concerns about obesity and diet, both real and imagined. You can nurture healthy perceptions as you nurture their bodies with nutritious foods, such as yogurt.

The journal Pediatrics recently reported on five obesity studies relating to body-image expectations among girls and the effects of actual obesity on children's health. By some estimates, overweight youngsters now make up 25 percent of the population.

Parents Perceptions Rub Off on Young Girls

Among the results of the studies:

• Even very young children are aware of society's fixation on thinness, according to a study from Penn State University. Researchers found that being overweight lowered self-esteem in girls as young as five. This attitude was closely correlated with parents' perceptions.
• Another study from Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, also determined that even children of normal weight had concerns about obesity.

TV and Eating Are a Bad Combination

• A study from the School of Nutrition, Science and Policy at Tufts University found that children whose families routinely watched television at mealtime ate more salty snacks and sodas and fewer fruits and vegetables than those who turned the TV off at mealtime.

A Possible Link to Heart Disease in Adults

• Epidemiologist Marjolein Visser of Vrije University in Amsterdam, Netherlands, studied American children ages 8 to 16. She discovered that even the youngest overweight children had a bloodstream inflammation that has been linked to heart disease in adults. The overweight children were three to five times more likely to have such inflammation, which is associated with a substance called C-reactive protein, or CRP.

These studies merely underscore the need to reduce our children's' intake of unhealthy foods and replace them with nutritious foods, such as yogurt.

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