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Is it ever too early to diet?

How about age 10? Is that too early?

What about age 5? And age 2?

Well apparently, toddler diets are growing in popularity, some even focusing on newborns. Weightloss clinics for two-year-olds. Exercise programs for four-year-olds.

Here's a snippet from today's Wall Street Journal article:

The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center launched a weight-management group for 2- to 5-year-olds in February. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, which has been running FitKids, a program for 6- to 12-year-olds, recently began training health-care providers to counsel parents of newborns to 5-year-olds. Children's Healthcare says it started the new program after hearing from local physicians that they were seeing younger and younger overweight kids in their practices.

One can hardly dispute that something needs to be done. The above chart shows the increase in obese toddlers and young children in the past 30 years. But is a toddler diet the answer?

According to Dr. Vincent Iannelli, M.D., a board certified pediatrician and Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Surprisingly, toddlers only need about 1,300 calories each day. One reason that parents often think that their toddlers don't eat enough is that they overestimate how much they should be eating at each meal.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, a good guideline is that a toddler portion size should equal about a quarter of an adult portion size. If that doesn't seem like enough, remember that you can always give your toddler seconds, especially when it comes to veggies and other healthy foods.

Examples of toddler size portions include:

• 1/4 to 1/2 slice of bread
• 1/4 cup of dry cereal
• one to two tablespoons of cooked vegetables
• 1/2 piece of fresh fruit
• 1/3 cup of yogurt
• 1/2 egg
• 1 tablespoon of smooth peanut butter (if no risk of food allergies) spread thinly on bread or a cracker
• 1 ounce of meat

Again, if your toddler wants to eat more, you can always give seconds, like another tablespoon of vegetables or the other half of a piece of fruit. The only important nutritional limits are not to overdo it on milk and juice. Any more than 16 to 24 ounces of milk and four to six ounces of fruit juice will likely fill up your child so that he isn't hungry for real food.

Final thought: If the idea of toddlers on diets is disturbing to you, at what age would you consider it normal to diet? 12? 16? Your thoughts?