Raising Healthy Children…

I am very happy to announce the arrival of my fifth child! With the hectic schedule and lack of sleep that goes with a newborn in the house, I have been a bit lackadaisical about updating the blog. While my wife was at the hospital I was responsible for the other four which was quite a task – much respect to all the mothers out there, especially my wife. All gratitude aside, I was sitting in the hospital holding my new son when I got thinking about the heavy responsibility of parenting. I thought about all the things that we as parents can do to positively impact our child’s future health. I have an entire section in my book explaining all the evidence for the impact of development on future risk of obesity so I thought I would post a snippet on the topic to show you how important it is.

You are probably well aware of the astronomic increase in the waistlines of Americans over the past 20+ years (if not check out my post – How Bad is it?). It shouldn’t surprise you that the same deadly trend is happening in our children. About one in six kids is obese (above the >95th percentile for weight). Many overweight kids are now afflicted with conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure and are forced to take pills that used to be reserved for older adults. I’ve started seeing more and more younger people with massive heart attacks and strokes roll into my ICU of late. Not only is the weight taking a toll on children’s current health and self-esteem, it is also increasing the risk that they will be overweight and obese when they reach adulthood. It has been clearly shown that the risk of adult obesity is more than twice as high for obese children as for non-obese children. The later in childhood that kids are obese the more likely they will be obese as adults. It appears that early adolescent is the point of no return. If your kids have bad lifestyle habits when they reach that age, the odds are they will struggle with weight for the rest of their lives. The lifestyle and physiologic toll of obesity during development dooms these innocent victims to a lifetime of fighting weight. These kids are being robbed of their health at such a young age. Even worse, the life-shortening consequences of obesity will have a greater effect on shortening their lifespan because the damage of chronic illness starts so much earlier.

The bottom line is that to make a major impact on the overweight epidemic in our country there needs to be a much greater effort by parents, schools, government, and the broader community to educate and train children to lead a healthy and normal weight life. We all need to train our children to eat well and exercise more. To all parents out there, there is no time to lose. As I showed you above, the longer a child is obese the more likely they are to be obese for their entire life. You have to start now. You can change the course of your child’s entire life for the better. You can save them untold suffering.

Of course, if you don’t transform your own relationship to food and weight, how can you expect them to?

References:

Guo S, Roche A, Chumlea W, Gardner J, Siervogel R. The predictive value of childhood body mass index values for overweight at age 35 y. Am J Clin Nutr 1994;59:810-9.

Serdula M, Ivery D, Coates R, Freedman D, Williamson D, Byers T. Do Obese Children Become Obese Adults? A Review of the Literature. Preventive Medicine 1993;22:167-77.