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WEDNESDAY, Aug. 9 (HealthDay News) -- American babies carry more "baby fat" now than ever before, a new study finds.

Researchers say infants are 59 percent more likely to be overweight today than they were two decades ago.

"The obesity epidemic in our country has spared no age group, even our very youngest children," said lead researcher Dr. Matthew Gillman, an associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School. "Overweight rates are going up in young children, and ours is the first study to show that they are going up in infants, in addition to toddlers and preschoolers," he said.

In the study of 120,680 children under six years of age, Gillman's team found that children, especially infants, are now more likely to be overweight. Looking at records collected from pediatricians working with a Massachusetts HMO for the years 1980 to 2001, they found that the prevalence of overweight children climbed from 6.3 percent to 10 percent during those 22 years. In addition, the proportion of children at risk of becoming overweight grew from 11.1 percent to 14.4 percent overall.

The report was published in the July issue of Obesity.

Infants had a 59 percent increased risk of being overweight, and the number of overweight infants increased by 74 percent, the researchers found.

The data suggests that obesity prevention may need to start even before babies are born, Gillman said. There are a number of factors that appear to be responsible for the trend, he noted.

The first is that women who become pregnant weigh more than they ever have, Gillman said, and "maternal body mass index is a determinate of infant weight at birth and after."

In addition, more mothers are putting on excess weight during pregnancy compared with decades past, Gillman said. "There is also an increase in type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes among mothers, which are determinants of infant weight at birth and after birth," he added.

How babies are fed may also play a role. "Infants that are breast-fed tend to gain weight more slowly than formula-fed infants," the Harvard expert said.

Gillman said early weight gain can have dire consequences for long-term health. Studies suggest that gaining excess weight during the first months of life is associated with becoming overweight and developing high blood pressure years later. Other data suggests that infants who gain excess weight are more likely to suffer from wheezing, which can lead to asthma, Gillman noted.

"We need to think about preventing obesity at the very early stages of life," he said. "Women need to maintain exclusive breast-feeding for at least four to six months, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics," he said.

One expert called the finding just one more facet of the ongoing obesity epidemic.

"This news is disturbing, but not surprising," said Dr. David L. Katz, an associate professor of public health and director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine. "The progression from lean to overweight to dangerously obese occurs slowly, one pound at a time. The widely publicized increases in childhood obesity indicate that weight gain is beginning at an ever younger age. These data merely confirm the obvious," he said.

The message is disturbing for several reasons, Katz said. "As weight gain becomes problematic earlier in life, other chronic disease can be expected to do the same. If overweight becomes commonplace among babies, heart disease may well become commonplace among adolescents, as type 2 diabetes is already," he said.

The trend is also troubling because the nature of weight gain varies with age, Katz said. Infants and adolescents are far more adept at generating new fat cells than adults, he explained, and obesity caused by a high number of fat cells is harder to reverse than obesity caused by enlarging pre-existing fat cells.

"As difficult as weight control is for us, it will be that much harder, and more elusive, for our children," he said.

"The findings reported here are from a single HMO in one part of the country, but they contribute to an overwhelming body of evidence that childhood obesity is a crisis throughout the United States," Katz said.

More information

For more on childhood obesity, head to the American Obesity Association  .

FRIDAY, Aug. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Exercise may slow age's impact on brain function, helping maintain whip-smart cognitive ability well into the senior years and preventing dementia-like illness, a new review of the data shows.

While there are varying opinions on the brain benefits of exercise and activity, "our review of the last 40 years of research does offer evidence that physical exercise can have a positive influence on cognitive brain functions in older animal and human subjects," wrote the study authors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"We have found that physical and aerobic exercise training can lower the risk for developing some undesirable age-related changes in cognitive and brain functions and also help the brain maintain its plasticity -- [the brain's] ability to cover one function if another starts failing later in life," the authors wrote.

The researchers presented their findings Friday at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in New Orleans.

Some studies that included men and women over age 65 found that those who exercised three times a week for at least 15 to 30 minutes a session were less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease -- even if they were genetically predisposed to the condition.

And a study that examined the association between exercise and brain function in people ages 62 to 70 found that "those who continued to work and retirees who exercised showed sustained levels of cerebral blood flow and superior performance on general measures of cognition as compared to the group of inactive retirees."

Another study that compared older adults who walked and those who did stretching and toning found that those who walked were better able to ignore bothersome distractions.

"Aerobically trained older adults showed increased neural activities in certain parts of the brain that involved attention and reduced activity in other parts of the brain that are sensitive to behavioral conflict," the review authors said.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Aging has more about exercise for older adults.

TUESDAY, Aug. 8 (HealthDay News) -- An online intervention program may prevent some high-risk, college-age women from developing eating disorders, says a California study funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The study of 480 college-age women who were identified as being at risk for developing an eating disorder included an eight-week, online cognitive behavioral intervention program called Student Bodies, which previous small-scale, short-term studies had found to be effective.

The intervention program is designed to decrease concerns about body weight and shape, enhance body image, promote healthy eating and weight maintenance, and increase users' knowledge about the risks of eating disorders.

The women were required to do reading and other assignments, such as keeping an online body-image journal, and they also took part in an online discussion group that was moderated by clinical psychologists.

The participants were interviewed immediately after they completed the online program and annually for up to three years after that in order to determine their attitudes about their weight and shape and to check for the onset of any eating disorders.

The program seemed to be most successful among women who had body mass indexes (BMIs) of 25 or higher at the start of the study. Among these women, none had developed an eating disorder after two years, compared to 11.9 percent of women with comparable BMIs in a control group that did not use the intervention program.

The program also seemed effective among women who had some eating disorder symptoms at the start of the study, such as self-induced vomiting, laxative, diet pill or diuretic use, or excessive exercising.

Among these women in the intervention group, 14 percent developed an eating disorders within two years, compared to 30 percent of women with the same characteristics in the control group.

The findings were published in the August issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

"This study shows that innovative intervention can work and offers hope to those trying to overcome these illnesses," Dr. Thomas Insel, NIHM director, said in a prepared statement.

More information

The U.S. Center for Mental Health Services has more about eating disorders.

TUESDAY, Aug. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Need more proof that a diet high in saturated fats is bad for your heart?

Australian researchers found that eating just one piece of carrot cake high in saturated fat and drinking a milkshake can reduce the body's ability to protect itself against heart disease.

The saturated fat in the cake and the milkshake hampered the ability of the volunteers' "good" cholesterol -- high-density lipoprotein (HDL) -- to do its job. That job is to protect the inner lining of the arteries from inflammatory agents that promote plaque, which clogs the vessels. And the carrot cake and milkshake also reduced the arteries' ability to expand and carry enough blood to organs and tissues, the researchers found.

The take-home message? "Saturated fat meals might predispose to inflammation of and plaque build up in the vessels," said Dr. David Celermajer, Scandrett professor of cardiology at the Heart Research Institute, and Department of Cardiology, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, University of Sydney.

Celermajer was a co-author of the study that was expected to be published in the Aug. 15 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In the study, Celermajer and his colleagues fed 14 healthy volunteers, ages 18 to 40, two meals eaten a month apart. The volunteers gave blood samples before eating, three hours after eating, and again three hours after that.

They didn't know if they were eating high saturated-fat foods or not. The meals were the same, except one was made with highly saturated coconut oil, and the other with polyunsaturated safflower oil. Each meal featured a slice of carrot cake and a milkshake.

The fat content was high -- about one gram of fat for every 2.2 pounds of body weight. But the meal with safflower oil had about 9 percent saturated fat, while the high saturated-fat meal contained nearly 90 percent saturated fat.

Saturated fat is the main dietary cause of high blood cholesterol, according to the American Heart Association, which recommends limiting saturated fat intake to 7 percent of total calories a day.

The amount of fat in the high-fat meal was equivalent to a 150-pound person eating a double cheeseburger, a large order of fries, and drinking a large milkshake, totaling about 68 grams of fat, the researchers said.

After three hours, the meal high in saturated fat had reduced the ability of the arteries to expand to increase blood flow. The polyunsaturated fat meal reduced this ability slightly as well, but the results weren't statistically significant.

When the researchers sampled the participants' blood six hours after eating, they found that the good (HDL) cholesterol's anti-inflammatory properties had decreased after the saturated fat meal but improved after the polyunsaturated fat meal.

"Our group has measured the anti-inflammatory properties of HDL in this way for years," said Celermajer. "But this is the first time we have studied the effects of any meals on how the HDL might behave."

Alice H. Lichtenstein, senior scientist and director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston, said the study results are "consistent with the current recommendation to restrict saturated fats. They give additional support [for following a diet with healthy fats]. The effects [seen in the study] are transitory," she added, "and there is not enough information on how this would impact cardiovascular risk" in the long run.

Celermajer acknowledged that the effects recorded in the study may be temporary. But, he added, people should be concerned "because it might happen every time they eat a fatty meal -- and thus not be fleeting at all."

Saturated fats aren't the only culprits weighing on America's health. A new review of data from 30 studies conducted over the past four decades identifies increased consumption of sugary drinks as a leading cause of obesity.

According to the study, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, adding just one extra can of soda per day to the diet results in a 15-pound weight gain over the course of a year. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health also noted that about a third of all carbohydrate calories in the American diet now come from added sweeteners, with beverages accounting for about half of that amount.

The Harvard team said the evidence strongly supports efforts to discourage consumption of soft drinks and other sugary beverages, especially among children.

In a prepared statement, the American Beverage Association -- which represents the industry -- dismissed the findings. "Blaming one specific product or ingredient as the root cause of obesity defies common sense. Instead, there are many contributing factors, including [lack of] physical activity," the group said.

Meanwhile, another new study reports that diet alone isn't enough to shrink fat cells in the abdomen and reduce the threat of heart disease and diabetes. Exercise must be added to the mix, too, according to preliminary results from a five-year study by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researchers.

"The message is very clear," said Tongjian You, an instructor in geriatric medicine and lead author of the report. "Exercise is important to reducing the size of these cells and may one day be part of a prescription for treating the health complications associated with abdominal fat."

The finding was reported in the August issue of the International Journal of Obesity.

More information

To learn more about fats, visit the American Heart Association  .