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Study: 15 Percent of Toddlers in Boston are Drinking Coffee
By Amy Graff
Is is OK for toddlers to drink cups of joe?
A significant number of parents in Boston seem to think so.
A study led by Boston Medical Center found “15 percent of toddlers (age 2) consume as much as four ounces of Java a day” — that’s half a “Short” at Starbucks.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has never advised parents on cof- fee intake for children. The little research that has been done indicates an association between children’s coffee con- sumption and depres- sion, type 1 diabetes, sleep disturbances, sub- stance abuse and obesi- ty. One of the few stud-
ies on toddlers specifi- cally revealed 2-year- olds who drank coffee or tea between meals or at bedtime had “triple the odds of being obese in kindergarten.”
“Our results show that many infants and tod- dlers in Boston — and perhaps in the US — are being given coffee and that this could be associ- ated with cultural prac- tices,” lead study author Dr. Anne Merewood, associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, said in a state- ment.
Maternal ethnicity and gender were factors con- tributing to a parent’s tendency to give a child coffee. Young tykes of Hispanic mothers were more likely to gulp down
coffee and female tod- dlers were heavier drinkers than males.
For the study Dr. Merewood and her team analyzed data com- piled on 315 moth- er-infant pairs for a prospective cohort study on infant weight gain and diet. They were looking for trends in consumption of breast milk, for- mula, water and juice among tod- dlers and were sur- prised to find that parents were giving their children coffee.
Now, back to that initial question: Is it OK for toddlers to drink coffee?
For an answer, SFGate checked in
with Dr. Dewey Woo, chief of pediatrics at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco.
“I personally do not rec-
ommend coffee to my young patients,” Dr. Woo said. “I have some con- cerns with the effects of caffeine on young chil- dren. Long term studies
have not been conduct- ed to tell us the full side effect of caffeine in chil- dren.”
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