Posts tagged Child Obesity

Obesity in Schools Begins in the Womb?

Any time there is a problem that seems easy to solve but that is still unsolvable, you can be sure that it is just a matter of how people think “No one does that! Do we really have to? “. People generally like to not make any difficult changes, unless it makes them stand out. The obesity in schools that we see all around (actually a third of all America’s schoolchildren),  can often be put down to a number of behavior patterns that people tell themselves are really not their fault. Money is tight, and so parents have to work long hours away from their children. Being away so long, parents don’t have the time to arrange for a good quality food, and so, unsupervised children pick fast food. And since parents aren’t around to keep their children moving along, TV (and all the junk food advertised on it) take the place of quality family time. Did I say that a third of all children were overweight? Well, two-thirds of their parents are overweight too, and would find it a little embarrassing to enjoin their children to slim down.

But there are some things that can be done, the first lady Michelle Obama’s focus on obesity in schools, finds. For instance, a Columbia University research program, that followed hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren over several years, finds that obesity levels rise in schools that happen to have a fast food restaurant within the radius of a block around. They are really serious about this study; they’ve used a fairly large sample, and the hundreds of thousands, and they’ve been studying their subjects for nearly 10 years. In fact, they studied schools and the children for so long, they could actually see how children did before fast food outlets opened up in the area, and how quickly these previously healthy children developed a weight problem, after. The scientists finally put the figure at a 5% additional risk of obesity that children face if their school happens to be near a fast food outlet. Now, there is talk of redoing zoning laws around the country, to make sure that schools and fast food outlets are never found closer than a quarter-mile apart. It isn’t just children that are affected to have a McDonald’s nearby. A study done in pregnant women found exactly the same thing: if they lived near a fast food outlet, they gained a lot more weight than women who lived farther away. It certainly looks like obesity in schools starts really early – like even before children are born.

But what do you do when the fast food outlet in question isn’t near a school so much as it is right in it? The first lady’s Let’s Move campaign focuses on vending machines and cafeteria staples around the country like french fries, cola, and candy. In fact, there is legislation planned that will actually make it an offense for schools to stock such junk food. You’d think that Republican support for a plan like this would be quite forthcoming; you would not be that right; most Republicans, when they are asked on television interviews about their support for the legislation, protest that it sounds too much like some big brother scenario. But they might come around; after all, it’s their children in those schools too.

Child Obesity – A Window into the Future, often, a Short Future

Does it seem to ring true? The claim, coming from extensive research done on thousands of children is that, a child who grows obese in childhood, is twice as likely as any normal child, to die by the age of 55, either through falling ill or through suicide. And not even a crazy situation like childhood diabetes or high blood pressure, can push a child close to catastrophe as much as child obesity can. If you like to read the New England Journal of Medicine, you’d see this study in a recent issue. What makes that study so compelling is that they took the trouble to pick thousands of children for their research, and to follow them for decades.

So, to have a child grow obese, isn’t something that can be taken care of later. If the child is obese now it will absolutely have effects on her life expectancy and health, 40 years later, even if she pulls herself together and loses weight by then. Of course, to late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians around the country, fat lazy kids have been a big source of cheap laughs for years; but it really is no laughing matter that one in three children in America falls in the overweight or obesity category if it will tell on their health decades from now. Something really serious in the body appears to get damaged by child obesity. And so, perhaps it is just as well that the first lady, Michelle Obama, is following up her campaign to get America to each more greens, with a campaign to end obesity in childhood.

The study actually took up and followed ten-year-old children who lived in Indian reservations, starting around the year 1945. They happened to pick American Indian children, because the obesity problem started out much earlier in that population than it did in the general American population. They kept following those very children until many of them began to die by the year 2000 of poor health. Plenty more were lost to alcoholism and drugs. This was not something that happened to the thin children as they grew up. Kids who suffered from child obesity, were more than twice as likely to die by 55; children with high glucose levels, were one-and-a-half times more likely to die by that age too.

How does this study help you help your child? If you take your child in to get looked over by a doctor, and he says that there isn’t much to worry about, because even if there is some weight trouble in evidence, all the tests for blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels checked out okay, you know that the doctor is wrong. Child obesity isn’t just bad because it makes children likely to be affected by those symptoms. Childhood obesity is just dangerous in and of itself. It may be easy to dismiss a study like this, pointing to how it was done on a different race of people altogether. But they found that American Indians in their health, always seem to lead the rest of the nation by a few decades. Studying this group, always gives scientists a window into the future.