Body Composition of Rural Children Aged 2-6 Years of Bengalee Ethnicity from Arambagh, West Bengal, India Gopal Chandra Mandal 1* and Kaushik Bose 2 1 Bangabasi College, Kolkata,West Bengal, India 2 Vidyasagar University, Paschim Midnapur, West Bengal, India KEYWORDS Anganwari Children. Body Fat. Body Mass Index ABSTRACT Knowledge of the body composition in terms of fat and fat-free mass is used in pediatrics to estimate a child’s nutritional status and the prevalence of obesity in children and youth. The present cross-sectional study focused to evaluate the relationship of age, sex and Body Mass Index (BMI) with body fat composition measures among preschool children of Bali Gram Panchayat, Arambagh, Hooghly District in West Bengal, India.A total of 1,012 children (boys = 498. girls = 514) aged 2-6 years were measured. Significant age and sex variations were found in BMI and the body composition measures. Sex specific correlation of age with six body composition variables (except BMI) showed highly significant (p < 0.01) positive correlations except only in one, that is, PBF among boys, which showed a negative correlation. Sex specific correlation of BMI with other five body composition variables showed significant positive correlations (p< 0.01) between both the sexes. Authors have a weaker correlation among boys (r = 0.12) compared to much stronger correlation among girls (r=0.72) in case of PBF. * Address for correspondence: Dr. Gopal Chandra Mandal, Associate Professor in Anthropology Bangabasi College, Kolkata,India E-mail: golmal_anth@rediffmail.com INTRODUCTION A very rapid postnatal growth occurs in in- fancy and is accompanied by major changes in body composition. Knowledge of these chang- es in body composition in infants is useful in understanding the nutritional needs and func- tional outcome of nutritional management for healthy and sick infants (Koo 2000). Nutrition, physical activity and behavior modifying tech- niques are widely applied components of inter- ventions treating obese children and adoles- cents (Martínez-Gomez et al. 2009). In a very re- cent study, it was found that the relation be- tween body composition and physical activity has not confirmed in expected parameters among the preschool children of Poland and the effect of inadequate physical activity is not visible in this period of life but may have serious health consequences in adulthood (Palanska et al. 2017). Intervention efforts may be better direct- ed at maintaining a healthy weight for the major- ity of preschool children, which can still be achieved through the promotion of physical ac- tivity and gross motor skill development through activities that could also improve cognitive de- velopment and the reduction of sedentary be- havior (Draper et al. 2016). Several methods are available to assess childhood and adolescent obesity but the most widely used both in clini- cal and epidemiological settings, are weight, height and body mass index (Moreno et al. 1999). Tracking of obesity in children is generally per- formed using body mass index (BMI). However, the limitation of BMI is that it does not distin- guish obesity due to excess fat mass from the obesity due to excess lean body mass (Must and Anderson 2006). Nowadays, BMI has pro- gressively replaced the concept of ‘ideal body weight’ since the latter had the drawback of be- ing dependent upon reference standards of body weight and height from populations, which slow- ly changed from decade to decade and also var- ied according to which reference standard was used (Garn et al. 1986). Methods to examine changes in children’s body fat composition in- clude simple field methods such as bioelectrical impedance (BIA) and skin fold thickness mea- surements (Vicente-Rodriguez et al. 2012).Re- peated and accurate assessment of body com- position during infancy enables one to deter- mine the composition of the weight gained over time and provides key information for evaluat- ing nutritional requirements, the efficacy of diet J Life Science, 9(1): 48-54 (2017) 10.1080/09751270.2017.1336015 DOI: