Can a baby’s diet predict their future weight? How the PEA POD and BOD POD helps unlock the answers.
What if the first few months of life could shape your health forever? That’s exactly what researchers at the Josef Ressel Centre at FH JOANNEUM are investigating. Backed by the Austrian Ministry of Science, this innovative project is exploring how nutrition in the earliest stages of life can influence the risk of obesity later on.
The spotlight is on the first 1000 days, a critical window when a child’s body and metabolism are rapidly developing. Feeding practices during this time—how much infants eat, what they eat, and how satiety cues are managed—can have long-term consequences on weight and overall health.
To better understand how fat mass develops in early infancy, researchers are using the COSMED PEA POD Infant Body Composition System. This cutting-edge device provides a safe, fast, and highly accurate way to measure an infant’s body composition—specifically the ratio between fat mass and fat-free mass—starting from the first days of life. Unlike traditional growth assessments, PEA POD offers direct and reliable data on how a baby’s body is developing, helping to detect early signs of abnormal fat accumulation that could be linked to feeding patterns.
As the children grow, the study continues to monitor their body composition—together with that of their mothers—using the COSMED BOD POD. This non-invasive device applies air displacement plethysmography to accurately measure body composition in children and adults, making it ideal for longitudinal tracking across different stages of development.
The integration of both systems ensures consistent, high-quality data from birth through toddlerhood and into early childhood. Are breastfed babies at lower risk than formula-fed ones? How do feeding volumes and nutrient composition affect fat development? Can we recognize when a baby is full and avoid overfeeding? These are just a few of the questions the research team is exploring—with the help of advanced technology from COSMED.
By combining body composition data from PEA POD and BOD POD with nutritional assessments, biomarker analysis, and growth monitoring, the study aims to uncover the key factors behind early-life obesity—and how to prevent it from the very beginning. With childhood obesity on the rise worldwide, this research could be a game changer for how we approach maternal and infant health.
Discover more about COSMED PEA POD
The film was produced by Michael Rizzi and Maximilian Thum, students at the Institute of Design & Communication at FH JOANNEUM.
[ Video credits: FH JOANNEUM YouTube Official Channel ]
