Overweight Kids and Teens in the U.S.
As Americans learn what a public health calamity obesity has become in America, the issue of diet and weight is more and more frequently in discussion-in medical circles, around America's dinner tables. Is it making any difference?
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you The Skinny on Your Health.
There is some new research that seems to indicate that all this talk might be having a chilling effect on our meteoric weight gain. While Americans had been getting steadily heavier for about 40 years, new data shows that between 1999 and 2002, there was a leveling off.
While there are still distinctions among ethnic groups and by gender, on average, that flattening out occurred for children, teens and adults during that period.
Now, with two thirds of adults overweight, and fully one third actually clinically obese, this is no level where we want to remain, as a nation. America simply must shed some of its excess weight.
But to simply STOP GAINING is obviously a start.
Overweight Teens - American Teens are Heaviest
American teens have the world's highest disposable income for their age group. Also the most clothing and computers. And according to new research, they've also got the most excess weight.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you the Skinny on Your Health.
Researchers looked weight data for 13 and 15-year-olds in the United States and 14 other industrialized nations. They found that American teens, both boys and girls, weigh more than their peers abroad.
Why are U.S. teens so much bigger? Some of it has to do with those computers. American kids spend more time online or in front of the TV. And they spend less time walking to school or work than their peers in Europe, for instance, where everyone is more likely to walk or ride a bike.
Overweight teens and kids are likely to keep on gaining, research has already proven that. So it's critical to get preventive education about weight and health to today's heavy, overweight teens - if we don't want them to be tomorrow's obese adults.
Targeting Parents on Childhood Obesity
New research on treating childhood obesity offers pretty conclusive proof that if you want to help overweight children, it's the PARENTS who need to be the PATIENTS.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you the Skinny on Your Health.
In my bariatric practice, parents often want me to "fix" an overweight child after they've failed with various approaches, from punishment and reward models, to becoming the food police.
Those things just don't work, and I recommend a family-based approach, where it's not the heavy CHILD who is the focus, but rather, the family's PRACTICES and ENVIRONMENT - and that's all about re-educating parents.
A seven year study just released compared child-only treatment models to parent-only models, and found that the kids in the latter group fared better at every interval, and ultimately, lost more weight.
When it comes to weight problems, treating mom and dad to nutritional education, parenting guidance and medical advice helps the GROWN-UPS take care of the PROBLEM, so that kids just end up with the SOLUTION.
Childhood Obesity Prevention - Structure for Healthy Kids
When families with overweight kids come to me for help, they're often surprised by one of my core recommendations: Make a schedule, and put getting healthy ON IT.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you the Skinny on Your Health.
Consistency is the key to success in any lifestyle change. But it's hard to be consistent without a structure, especially for children. Implementing a scheduled routine helps, and assures that healthy new practices are regarded as priorities.
When a half hour of exercise is penciled in after daily homework and BEFORE any television, that exercise is supported at both ends. It's a nice change from the sedentary, mental activity of schoolwork, and it's rewarded with the child's selection of TV time.
And instead of letting kids just grab a bag of chips after school, PARENTS might want to plan just a few minutes to supervise the kids' preparation of a healthy snack.
Structure doesn't mean there's no room for spontaneity or individual choices, but anything that's important, belongs in the routine, and that includes getting exercise and eating properly.
Moms and Daughters - Exercise Perceptions
A look at the exercise habits and attitudes of young girls and their moms found some key differences between overweight girls and normal weight girls, but not necessarily the ones you might expect.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you the Skinny on Your Health.
They survey of 9 to 11-year-old girls found that there really WASN'T much difference in the AMOUNT of exercise the overweight and normal weight girls ACTUALLY participated in.
But more of the overweight girls reported that they believed they SHOULD BE doing more exercise. They also believed their PARENTS and FRIENDS thought so, too.
But in contrast to all the pressure those girls felt, the moms of the overweight girls were actually LESS likely to say anything to them about exercise.
Importantly, they were also less likely to actually DO any kind of activity WITH their daughters.
The normal weight girls and their mothers did more together and had more fun doing it, perhaps proving that the family that PLAYS together, stays healthier together, too.
Solutions to Childhood Obesity - Defining Kids & Parents Roles in Weight Loss
When a child is overweight, sometimes the trickiest part of the problem is defining what role everyone has in the solution.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you the Skinny on Your Health.
Feeding our children is an act of love and nurturing, so parents don't always recognize when they're feeding a weight problem.
Or they might see the problem, but end up playing "food cop," becoming ineffectively oppressive and controlling about the child's eating.
So what are appropriate roles?
Parents get to set boundaries and make choices about WHAT is served and kept around the house.
Kids should get to decide whether or not to eat what is offered, and HOW MUCH.
A child may say he's hungry for pizza instead of roasted chicken, but if the parent is consistent in offering only healthy choices, that is what a hungry child will eat.
By bringing in salty snacks and sweets only for special occasions, kids learn to see them as TREATS, as they should.
This approach to finding Solutions to Childhood Obesity aims at fixing the family's DIET, rather than attempting to fix the CHILD.
Height and Adiposity in Children
Tall kids tend to grow in different spurts and have more body fat than average-height kids. That made some experts wonder if body mass index might unfairly score them as overweight when they're not.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you the Skinny on Your Health.
The researchers checked the BMI -those scaled cross-sections of height and weight- of more than a thousand kids. Then they cross-checked BMI against a number of other measures, including skin fold tests and body fat scans.
It was a lot of complicated science to find out that the little mathematical formula for BMI turns out to be a consistently reliable measure for tall kids, up to age 12.
Still, no ONE snapshot of a child's body size, by ANY measure, is enough to know if their weight is healthy, especially with tall kids.
If you think your "big boy" may be bigger than is healthy, don't just guess or wonder silently. Have the doctor track his growth and weight, and ASK if there is something to worry about. It's always better to know than to ignore it.
Preventing Childhood Obesity - Clean Your Plate!
As a child, Bonnie hated being told to "clean her plate," yet as a mother, she finds herself teaching her children to do the same.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, giving you The Skinny on Your Health.
"Clean your plate" might have made sense in a time when food was scarce or the next meal was uncertain. Nowadays, there's little risk of that in America, yet we continue that old training, suppressing healthy instincts.
Research shows babies who are breast fed rather than bottle fed are much less likely to become overweight later. Experts think that's because they learn to stop from their body's own signals, whereas a bottle-fed baby learns to eat until the bottle's empty, even if they're already full.
And old-fashioned dinnertime policies like "clean your plate" teach the same thing.
Today, American kids are at much greater risk of obesity than starvation. It makes more sense to teach our children to start small, eat slowly, and stop when they're done.
They can leave "cleaning the plate" for when it's time to do the dishes.
Children Diet - The Dieting Paradox for Kids
Kids on diets? That's bad news.
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, with Get the Skinny on Your Health.
A recent study of 15,000 nine- to 14-year-olds shows that over time, when youngsters diet, they tend to gain - not lose - excess body weight.
Reaching and maintaining healthy weight requires a long-term, lifestyle approach. Can a child really understand that? When very few adults honestly make the lifestyle changes that produce the results, could a child do any better?
Evidently not. After a brief period of radical change in eating habits, most kids go back to eating patterns developed over their lifetime - the same patterns that led to the excess weight to begin with.
Obviously, prevention is the best solution, but for kids who are already overweight, nutritional re-education and gradual, healthy change, guided by a doctor and responsible parents, will keep kids safely out of the diet trap.
Quality of Life for Overweight Kids and Teens
Few would be surprised to learn that kids with cancer score lowest on quality-of-life evaluations. But guess who is right there with them?
Seriously overweight kids!
I'm Dr. Caroline Cederquist, with Get The Skinny on Your Health.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study, which showed that on virtually every measure of quality of life, overweight children report scores just as low as kids with cancer, and in some areas, even lower. With physical, emotional and social problems, overweight children are burdened with far more than excess body weight.
Yet unlike cancer patients, they are not treated with compassion or sympathy. Indeed, these kids are ridiculed and stigmatized.
Many parents or even doctors will avoid the subject of weight with kids.
They often fear if they mention weight as a concern it will hurt the child's feelings or cause them to develop an eating disorder.
The bottom line is, these children are already suffering emotionally and physically and while helping a child lose weight takes work and considerable family involvement it is well worth the effort.
