Professor Tony Okely is researching childhood obesity.Picture: ROBERT PEET
The super-sizing of cups, bowls and plates is just one reason why children are getting fatter, according to a University of Wollongong academic.
One quarter of Australian children aged two to 18 are overweight or obese - and that figure is rising faster than in any other country.
Professor Tony Okely, who will discuss childhood obesity at a Uni in the Brewery event this evening, is researching new ways to combat the problem.
"Since 2000 the prevalence of overweight and obese children in Australia has risen faster than any other developed country around the world," he said.
"That includes the US, where 28 per cent of children are obese or overweight - we're just under that at 25 per cent and rapidly catching up."
Professor Okely, the director of UOWs Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute, said dismissing a child's extra weight as "puppy fat" was never helpful.
"There's no such thing as puppy fat," he said. "Children grow so we don't need them to lose weight, we just need to stop unhealthy weight gain."
Often it was the simple things that could get parents and their kids back on track, such as reading product labels more carefully or investing in smaller tableware.
"The size of cups, bowls and plates has increased over time, meaning we're filling them with more food or drink, and consuming more," Professor Okely said.
More time spent outdoors and engaging in incidental exercise was vital, as was making an effort to stand more frequently.
"We spend much more time sitting these days and we should be trying to get kids into the habit of trying to break that up, by getting up and walking around every 15 to 20 minutes.
"Plus there's plenty of tasks we do sitting that we can actually do while standing - get kids to read or draw or even eat while standing up at the breakfast bar for instance."
Limiting time using TVs, computers or smartphones to one hour for preschool kids, and two hours for school-aged kids, each day was another way to get more activity in.
A minimum of 10 hours of sleep a night for children was beneficial because lack of sleep had been linked to obesity.
"Obesity tracks strongly into adulthood; you're five times more likely to be obese as an adult if you were obese as a child, and this leads to all sorts of health, mental and social problems," Professor Okely said.
As part of his research into the area, Professor Okely will be running a 12-month study into adolescent obesity from January, and will be recruiting 50 Illawarra teens to take part.
He will speak at the free Uni in the Brewery event which is open to the public from 5.30pm to 6.30pm tonight at the Five Islands Brewery in Wollongong.