Supersized Growth Charts?

Disclaimer! I don't find the answer to my own question about whether or not growth charts today are super-sized. There'll have to be a Part 2...

I recently took my kids in for their 12-month (she's actually 14 months) and 3 year old appointments. After trying to get me to give DD more vaccinations because she's close to her 15 month appointment (and being flatly refused), we moved on to weight issues.

At our last appointment, my pediatrician told me that since my DD was moving around more often, she probably wouldn't gain a ton of weight and would instead be burning off her baby fat.

In fact, she is just one pound more now than she was last time we brought her to the doc. She showed me on the growth chart that her head circumference and height were average for her age, but her weight was just a bit below.

Now, I still think that my daughter could stand to gain a few pounds, but as I got to thinking about this growth chart some questions started to form in my mind. Firstly, isn't this growth chart just a chart of averages? Based on other children? Secondly, has this growth chart been adjusted for our own increase in size? Thirdly, if this is true, then the chart is just based on how big our kids have been growing based on a diet filled with hormone-laden milk and meat and processed foods?

Gathering a bunch of averages from babies and kids all over the place is well and good, but I don't think it can tell me how big any other kids should be. Where is the logic there? That we're all human so we should all be about the same size? My ass. We're all totally and completely different.

I keep seeing those images of a hamburger today vs. a hamburger from the 1970s. You've seen them, I'm sure. I think Morgan Spurlock might have mentioned it in his SuperSize Me movie...This graphic is from http://tigerfitnessla.com/blog/weight-loss/portion-distortion-meal-size-health/, but I have seen something like it everywhere lately.

I think that my daughter might fit more on the left side and the average kid might be more on the right. Where is the chart comparing my daughter to other girls who eat organic-food and mostly homemade stuff? That's the chart I want to see. Then again, maybe I'm just trying to resassure myself that she's fine.

For children under 2, our government recommends the WHO Growth Charts: WHO Growth Charts. The WHO Methodology (part of their Reference Study) is posted here. The standards for these charts can be found here.

The standards state that: "The MGRS [Multi-Growth Reference Study] collected primary growth data and related information from approximately 8500 children from widely different ethnic backgrounds and cultural settings (Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the USA). The new growth curves are expected to provide a single international standard that represents the best description of physiological growth for all children from birth to five years of age and to establish the breastfed infant as the normative model for growth and development."

I find this to be hilarious. Why? Because if you hadn't noticed, people and children of different ethnic backgrounds are different sizes. There are even runts and giants within each ethnicity. Why should my kid, who comes from basically Germanic/Nordic peoples who are terribly pale and pasty looking, be at all the same as a kid who comes from more robust stock? I think that both could be perfectly healthy and be vastly different sizes. I don't think there can be a perfect average number to point at.  

I do think that you can tell just by looking at a kid that he/she may not be thriving or is malnourished, etc. etc.

I have to give WHO kudos though, for noticing exactly the type of disparity I'm talking about. In 1993, they all got together and realized that their growth curves were based primarily on babies who were, as they put it, 'artificially fed' and that those babies couldn't possibly be used as a measure for breastfed babies. They even tried to use non-smoking mothers in their study, which seems like a minute (but important) detail. Here's their reasoning:

"Recent research conducted by WHO shows that the growth pattern of healthy breastfed infants
differs significantly from the current international reference. The negative deviations are large enough to lead health workers to make faulty decisions regarding the adequacy of the growth of breastfed infants, and thus to advise mothers to supplement unnecessarily, or even to stop breastfeeding altogether. Given breastfeeding’s health and nutritional benefits, this potential misinterpretation of the growth pattern of healthy breastfed infants has great public health significance. The premature introduction of complementary foods can have life-threatening consequences for young infants in many settings, especially where the role of breastfeeding in preventing severe infectious morbidity is crucial to child survival."

What I think is most important about this whole thing is to note that again, an outside entity (made up of fallible humans), is trying to quantify something very difficult to quantify. And all the doctors jump on board. So, regardless of whether a child was healthy-looking and happy, they were 'making faulty decisions' based on a stupid chart. We're all such dummies. 

I did learn that the CDC charts (for kids over 2) are really the ones I should be looking at to see if they account for kids eating crappy American diets versus kids eating...a little less crappily. Keep you posted. ;) 

Even better than all these would be a chart from God letting me know if she's just healthy. Averages don't mean anything except that she's the same as everyone else. A chart that compares my DD to me and her grandmothers back a few generations would be more helpful, but unfortunately nobody is making those sorts of data banks.

Until God or J.K. Rowling (What? She's invented lots of cool...imaginary...things...) produces such a document, I am going to take the edict that my baby is too small with a grain of salt.