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Clear Channel vs. Childhood Obesity
May 17th, 2012
Here is the question of the hour: Given the criticism showered upon other other organizations that have tried to add their childhood obesity wisdom to the public discourse, will Clear Channel Media and Entertainment fare any better, now that it has stepped up to take a swing?
We’re talking about advertisements, set to run on all 850 Clear Channel stations for three months. The co-presenters of the campaign are the government’s “We Can!” program (the National Institutes of Health) and the Advertising Council. This pro bono effort is said to be worth $30 million, which will no doubt enhance the communications empire’s tax status.
Five different radio spots are in English, with two of them available in Spanish. They are each 30 seconds long, humorous, and aimed at adults, says Jane L. Levere, who wrote about this project for The New York Times. The public service commercials will reach, at an optimistic guess, more than 230 million listeners. At the end of each, people are invited to visit the website, iHeartRadio, and more specifically its “Healthy Habits” section. So we did.
The general headings on the home page include these:
Take Small Steps to Get Healthy
UR What You Eat
Get Moving as a Family
Smarter Shopping
Walk the Walk
Fun Family Recipes
Nothing in these headings suggests any awareness on the part of the sponsoring agencies that factors other than diet and exercise might be involved in preventing childhood obesity or curing it. So far, there is no mention of the possibility that many children have fallen prey to actual addiction to foods that are carefully engineered to be addictive.
But let’s not judge too quickly. We haven’t even heard the radio announcements yet. Clear Channel has obligingly made them available on this page. They are listed by title, along with remarks, if any.
“Cut the Sweets” — Quickly names 20 tips for families to try.
“Walk” — Gives 20 more tips.
“Carrot Igloo” — A mini-drama in which a mother locks her child in an igloo made of carrots, with a warning that there are better ways to convince a child into healthful eating habits.
“Parents Drive Home” — Another little playlet in which a father leaves his overweight child to walk home from Grandma’s house.
“How Ice Cream is Made” — The most alarming scenario of all, where an adult frightens a child to tears by saying ice cream is made from the insides of stuffed animals.
Yes, the ads have a light touch and an obviously humorous intent. More than likely, they will attract complaints anyway. The campaign repeatedly asserts that there are hundreds of small ways to move a family’s habits into a more healthful path.
This multiplicity has already drawn a mild rebuke from Dr. Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, who feels that it might be too much of a good thing. The journalist quotes Dr. Schwartz thus:
Research has shown that people get overwhelmed when they are given too many options and sometimes choose to not act at all.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “An Anti-Obesity Campaign Takes to the Airwaves,” The New York Times, 05/01/12
Image by russbrady22 (Russ Brady), used under its Creative Commons license.
Culture, Economics, Ethnicity, and Childhood Obesity (Part 2)
May 16th, 2012
Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the cultural, economic, and ethnic factors that may contribute to children being overweight or obese. Those three realms of life are sometimes very difficult to discuss separately because in many cases they are intertwined. We talked a bit about the Hispanic community in the United States, and there is more to say.
For instance, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has been extensively involved with childhood obesity issues, is now sponsoring Salud America!, a program dedicated to preventing childhood obesity among the country’s Latino population. They make grants to people who work with after-school programs, and there is a nifty newsletter to sign up for. The website offers such interesting items as an interactive toolkit, La Mesa Completa, that show pastors and other community leaders how to guide families into better dietary habits.
Dr. Glenn Flores teaches pediatrics at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. In the course of interviewing him, journalist Barry Carpenter learned that, as one mother phrased it:
When you’re Latino everything is fried the majority of the time.
Dr. Flores set out to influence that situation by retrofitting the Latino menu in ways that would both alleviate the obesity problem and be acceptable to diners. This is always the tricky part of any reform scheme. Just imagine the revolutionary impact of tortillas made without lard. A chef may cook whatever he pleases, but unless he and his diners are all stuck someplace like a work camp in the frozen tundra, if people don’t like the food they won’t eat it. Especially kids.
But the volunteers who scientifically taste-tested the doctor’s enchiladas gave them a big thumbs-up. He told the reporter:
They were pleasantly surprised. Most of them admitted to us that they didn’t think it would taste good, but they couldn’t tell with the enchilada. They said, ‘I think this is delicious, I didn’t even know this was low fat cheese and that was multi-grain.’
Now, as for the American culture in general, we have quoted Dr. Pretlow on this subject before, and his words are worth repeating:
Junk food and fast food companies need to be regarded as harming health, similar to the shift in attitudes about tobacco companies.
Health lawyer and columnist Michele Simon has a sharp memory for experts she has interviewed in the past. Over time, obscure issues tend to come to the surface, and blatant issues tend to recur. In 2006, she spoke with law prof Richard Daynard of Northwestern University, about the growing tendency of the food industry to donate money to activist groups in hopes that they would not openly criticize the food industry. Wasn’t that similar to the tactics successfully used by the tobacco industry? This was Daynard’s answer:
It’s very interesting. Phillip Morris was a very active philanthropist. They particularly gave money to minority organizations, and basically bought silence. There have been a number of articles written about how the tobacco companies bought silence, particularly from black organizations. They also would advertise very heavily in minority media; one of the few national companies to do it. It resulted in the black organizations and the black media basically not getting the word out that they were among the principal victims of this industry. They also advertised in early feminist publications, such as Ms. Magazine when that was the leading feminist magazine. So they bought Gloria Steinem’s silence. They bought a lot of peoples’ silence by buying ads.
Julie Deardorff reported from Chicago on a local organization called Vive en Forma (Get Fit for Life) whose activism consists of taking an education booth to health fairs, festivals, and other venues where large numbers of the public may be found. They are able to do this thanks to a generous grant from Coca-Cola. Deardorff quotes the organization’s president, Teresa Farias Latter:
We don’t tell people to avoid soft drinks.
There is a very strong resemblance between the tobacco industry and the food industry. Additionally, they both resemble another business. Down in South America, the godfatherly lords of the cocaine industry, who generously fund clinics and many other benevolent enterprises, are said to be beloved by the people in their own neighborhoods. How much forgiveness should money be able to buy?
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “The Latest Advances in Fighting Latino Childhood Obesity,” Salud Today
Source: “Making tortillas withouth lard,” the33tv.com, 12/22/11
Source: “Mimicking Big Tobacco, Big Soda blows smoke in Philadelphia,” Grist, 04/04/11
Source: “Critics pounce on Coke, Pepsi health initiatives,” Chicago Tribune, 02/04/12
Image by DinnerDiary, used under its Creative Commons license.
Culture, Economics, Ethnicity, and Childhood Obesity
May 15th, 2012
Childhood Obesity News has been looking at how ideas about food and physical characteristics vary among people from different backgrounds. As Jerry Jeff Walker says, “Life is mostly attitude and timing.” If someone’s psyche has been marked by privation, she or he might very well believe that a chance to eat should never be neglected. It creates an attitude of “There is never enough.” If a young mother is part of a culture whose prevailing belief is that fat babies are the best, she is under enormous pressure to fatten up her babies.
ScienceDaily talks about a study published in the current Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The subjects were from the socio-economic group participating in WIC, the government program designed to make sure that low-income expectant mothers, babies, and small children are adequately nourished. When it comes to assessing the relative obesity of their young children, mothers from this group are wearing virtual blinders, consisting possibly of some kind of cultural filter.
An overly plump baby may signify excellent parenting skills and an appropriate level of love. Yet when children are successfully plumped up, mothers perceive them as thinner than they really are. The report, from Erin R. Hager and others at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is quoted:
Mothers of overweight toddlers were more than 88 percent less likely to accurately perceive their child’s body size… [N]early 70 percent of mothers were inaccurate in assessing their toddler’s body size when selecting a silhouette that correctly reflected their child’s true body size.
Edward Abramson, Ph.D., notes that since the 60s, when American kids started ballooning up, Jewish kids have fared even worse, statistically, in terms of childhood obesity. Despite the heavy pressure of tradition, he offers hope:
Heavy meals are a part of many Jewish holidays and celebrations. There’s an old joke that most Jewish holidays celebrate that someone tried to kill us, we won, so let’s eat! [...] With Shabbat dinners, Passover seders, jelly doughnuts at Chanukah, etc., there’s ample opportunity for our kids to pack on the pounds… Despite the rich foods associated with many Jewish traditions, parents can help their children to a healthy weight without diets and the increased risk of an eating disorder.
For Minnesota Public Radio, Elizabeth Baier profiled 10-year-old Samantha Flores, one of America’s 40% of Latino children who qualify as overweight or obese. Samantha’s mother Raquel Flores is totally into home cooking, but says her kids don’t like the traditional meals she cooks. They want things like macaroni and cheese and, of course, pizza. And she admits to buying what the children want, including snack foods and sugar-sweetened beverages. Baier writes:
In part, the problem stems from low levels of family income and education. More Latino children — 6.1 million — lived in poverty in 2010 than any other racial or ethnic, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Poor families like Samantha’s tend to stretch their budgets by buying fewer fresh fruits and vegetables and more high-calorie, low-cost convenience food, like sodas, candy and cereal, according to National Council of La Raza researchers.
Depending on where a person lives, attitudes about food can vary enormously, and cultural practices are so ingrained, it’s often hard to recognize them as things that could or should be changed. When a family is displaced from its home culture to another, the food insecurity level changes, along with many other variables. The foods they are accustomed to may not be available, and instead, there are all kinds of strange foods about which nothing is known. Nutritional labeling, even if it’s honest, can’t help much if there is a language barrier. When the cost of food is factored in, the situation gets really complicated.
Ethnicity impacts childhood obesity, not only because there appear to be some genetic roots to obesity, but because for many people, ethnicity and culture are so deeply interdependent. Even in the United States, large communities practice what could be considered third-world eating habits. Dr. Pretlow says:
What is really needed is a cultural shift in regard to highly pleasurable food, so that overeating is ‘not cool’ and so that junk food is ‘yuck.’ Junk food and fast food companies need to be regarded as harming health, similar to the shift in attitudes about tobacco companies. It may be helpful to define what a ‘food’ is, versus simply a highly pleasurable substance which may be consumed by kids.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Maternal Perceptions of Toddler Body Size Often Wrong,” ScienceDaily, 05/07/12
Source: “Is our cultural imperative to eat making our kids fatter?,” Jweekly.com, 05/05/12
Source: “Latino families battling childhood obesity,” minnesota.publicradio.org, 01/16/12
Image by laurelelephant (Laurel Hechanova), used under its Creative Commons license.
Is Sleep the Childhood Obesity Answer?
May 14th, 2012
The cultural consciousness is slowly adapting to the idea that some relationship might exist between childhood obesity and sleep, but exactly “what’s up with that” is not yet clear to anyone.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has several ideas, some of which are obvious. The way they phrase one of them is, “Screen time may displace more active pursuits.” This illustrates how the world is changing. The way things used to be — and still are for the majority (but soon might change) — if a kid goes out to play basketball, you could be pretty sure he is not watching reruns of his favorite TV show. Because the TV is in the family living room, and you would notice him on the couch.
Formerly, it was logistically difficult to fudge on the exercise factor. But, increasingly, kids are carrying around magical little devices that allow them to hunker down anywhere and watch music videos or play computer games. The other obvious reason to limit screen time is also in line with basic common sense. The reasoning goes like this: Seeing advertisements for food triggers cravings in children, so they eat more junk food. Therefore, the less TV they watch, the fewer advertisements they are exposed to, and the less fat they become.
This is fine, as far as it goes. But it becomes increasingly difficult to “limit screen time” when more and more kids have smartphones on their persons at all times. This trend is only heading in one direction, so the next best thing is to load up that phone with something that will be effective against childhood obesity, like the “W8 Loss 2 Go” iPhone app. Just sayin’.
What does the AAP think about sleep? This is another no-brainer. Staying up to watch TV or whatever can lead to a child’s not getting enough sleep. Because, just as a human can’t be in two different places at the same time, she or he can’t be awake and asleep at the same time. Sure, there are intermediate stages, and some people claim that watching TV is the mental equivalent of being in a coma. But we’re talking about the real, deep, undisturbed kind of sleep. A child who is asleep without a soundtrack is neither absorbing pseudo-food propaganda, nor eating. Q.E.D.
For healthcare professionals, in order to stave off future trouble, the organization recommends that any well-child visit should include the asking of two questions:
(1) How much screen time is being spent per day? and (2) Is there a TV set or Internet connection in the child’s bedroom?
For parents, perhaps that is a useful way to evaluate the healthcare professional. Does she or he ask those questions, even when there is no apparent problem? Because asking them shows concern for the child’s future well-being.
Unfortunately, Question #2 is almost obsolete, for the same reasons mentioned above. With a smartphone, it doesn’t matter what kind of connections are or are not in the room where the child sleeps. Or doesn’t sleep. Maybe at bedtime such devices should be left in a different room, recharging, or whatever it is they do.
The length of time spent sleeping has been linked to obesity, and some animal studies show that weight regulation might be connected with the timing of feedings. Little is known about the relationship between all three factors in humans.
A four-person research team (Kelly G. Baron, Kathryn J. Reid, Andrew S. Kern and Phyllis C. Zee) set out to develop “novel time-based interventions for weight management.” One thing they learned is, no matter when a person sleeps or for how long, eating after 8 PM seems to increase the risk of obesity. They write:
Fifty-six percent were ‘normal sleepers’ (midpoint of <5:30 AM) and 44% were ‘late sleepers’ (midpoint of sleep ≥5:30 AM). Late sleepers had shorter sleep duration, later sleep onset and sleep offset and meal times. Late sleepers consumed more calories at dinner and after 8:00 PM, had higher fast food, full-calorie soda and lower fruit and vegetable consumption. Higher BMI was associated with shorter sleep duration, later sleep timing, caloric consumption after 8:00 PM, and fast food meals.
Parents tend to get exasperated with kids who sleep all morning. The natural impulse is to urge, “Get up! Move around! Burn some calories! Do something useful!” But in South Korea, researchers made a discovery (published in the Journal of Sleep Research) that is counterintuitive, to say the least. It turns out that letting kids sleep in can somehow “reset” the sleep pattern, bringing it back closer to the healthy norm. This, in turn, is said to reduce a child’s obesity risk by 30% or more.
Pat Hagan reports that scientists at Seoul’s Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital questioned 936 children (age 10 and 11) and took their weights and measurements. They asked about habitual diet, exercise, and sleep patterns. By factoring out some of the other answers, they found that sleeping late on weekends makes a demonstrable difference.
There is another thing to bear in mind. We are told that kids don’t get enough exercise, their lifestyle is too sedentary, etc. Meanwhile, a very large proportion of American children are given drugs whose whole point and purpose is to render them more sedentary. It’s a hard question, whether to dose a hyperactive five-year-old with a pharmaceutical which, while it may help him behave in school, might set him on the road to childhood obesity. It’s worth thinking about.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Policy Statement—Children, Adolescents, Obesity, and the Media,” Pediatrics, 6/23/11
Source: “Role of Sleep Timing in Caloric Intake and BMI,” Obesity via Nature.com, 07/11
Source: “Weekend lie-in ‘Cuts childhood obesity by 30 per cent,’” DailyMail.co.uk, 04/20/12
Image by Uriel 1998 (Steven Saus), used under its Creative Commons license.
What Else Can Parents Do About Childhood Obesity?
May 11th, 2012
There’s so much advice about childhood obesity! Everyone has ideas about how to prevent and/or cure the problem, and Childhood Obesity News has been sifting through lists of recommendations from many sources.
For LA Times, Jeannine Stein summarized material from Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. These words are from Myles Faith, the organization’s chair:
In many cases, the adults in a family may be the most effective change agents to help obese children attain and maintain a healthier weight.
There it is: “the most effective.” Of course, he qualifies the statement with “may be.” Let’s interpret “may be” to mean, “If the adults get a clue, and are open to new ideas, and have what it takes to communicate effectively with kids, adults definitely are the most effective change agent.” In most cases, that means parents. And there can be no doubt at all that during the first few years of childhood, adults are in charge of everything.
Of course, Faith warns, the adults might have to change themselves first. One of the Heart Association’s suggestions is to get specific. Announcing that the family will exercise more is not enough. What kind of exercise, and when, needs to be decided, and then followed through. Goals need to be small, incremental, achievable, and specific.
Another of their ideas is to rearrange the kitchen so healthful foods are the first ones that appear to the eye and are the easiest to reach. Behavior-wise, the presiding adults need to practice what they preach. And it really helps to be positive. Tell the kid when he does something right, and back off from scolding or punishment.
The journalist also tells the other side:
Most studies did not show substantially more weight loss when parents were more involved, and the authors said future studies need to address what works and under what conditions.
And that’s okay. The human race has never been promised that all the answers are easy to find. There is nothing wrong with concentrating on the evidence that parental involvement does work, and find out exactly what those parents are doing. Even better, it’s a chance to be a part of the discovery adventure. Any parent who tells a success story on one of the many parenting blogs will be greeted as a hero.
For the adult who really means business and wants to initiate change, a couple of caveats are in order. The main thing to watch out for is expecting noticeable results right away. If prevention is the game, kids may not to cotton to every innovation as enthusiastically as we would like. Plenty of patience is needed, and the willingness to take it slow.
If a child is already obese, progress might be almost imperceptible. Nobody gets that way overnight, and the reverse is true: Nobody attains a healthy weight in a week. One of the tools in a parent’s kit has to be the willingness to take some things on faith, such as the possibility of indirect change. For instance, suppose the family institutes a program of walking around the block after dinner. It’s not much of a workout. The number of calories burned is not really impressive.
But… suppose, on one of these walks, the family meets up with a professional pet exerciser, and the overweight teenage son strikes up a conversation with this person. It’s totally possible that, six months down the line, the teenage son will be walking some dogs for spending money, and incidentally, as a consequence of all that extra exercise, weighing in at something close to normal.
You never know what might happen, and the good thing about all the strategies that are turning up is that none of them can do any harm. So — might as give some of them a try.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Getting Families Involved May Help with Childhood Obesity,” LA Times, 01/23/12
Image by MarkScottAustinTX, used under its Creative Commons license.
It Takes All Kinds to Make an Obese World
May 10th, 2012
Two years ago, a childhood obesity study made big news by confirming that all waistlines are not created equal. For Clinical Psychiatry News, Kate Johnson summarized:
Extreme obesity is on the rise in children and adolescents, and certain ethnic/racial minorities face a higher risk than do others… [M]ore than 6% of subjects aged 2-19 years met the criteria for extreme obesity, with the highest rates seen in Hispanic boys aged 6-11 years and 12-19 years (11%), and black girls aged 12-19 years (12%).
Extreme obesity is the kind a person can die from, sooner rather than later. The raw numbers were huge: 710,000 kids, all enrolled with Kaiser Permanente, and an accumulation of close to two million patient visits. The study authors, led by Corinna Koebnick, Ph.D., also of Kaiser Permanente, wrote:
Analogous to the concept of ‘pack-years’ for smoking patients, extremely obese children may suffer cumulative effects of their ‘pound-years’…
It rarely pays to generalize, and, of course, many other ethnic groups also have this trait, but the African American population has traditionally been known for family cohesiveness around food. No matter how poor or fragmented, families had a strong cultural tradition of getting together over meals. Whether gathered for a holiday or a funeral, the family would find its center in the kitchen where starchy, high-fat foods were lovingly prepared in abundance. It’s hard to abandon traditional practices, especially when they are so bound up with nurturing, caring, and bonding.
Black America has also been more accepting of physical bulk. Back in the day, skinny little Josephine Baker went over to Paris to get famous, but at home, Bessie Smith was the goddess of song. Nobody cared how hefty she was, or how big any of the other super-size divas were who followed in her footsteps. Anticipating the philosophy of “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” they added “big” to their names and got on with singing. As for the fans, priorities were assigned — a voice was a voice, and besides, when there was no television — who cared?
A recent New York Times opinion piece by novelist Alice Randall, writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, stirred up some controversy with its many provocative statements, of which these are samples:
Too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.
Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not. I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.
A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept.
Randall invokes the work of Andrea Elizabeth Shaw on the historical roots of this phenomenon, and her theory that “the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.” At the same time, common sense impels her to acknowledge that approximately 80% of adult black women are overweight, and one out of four has diabetes.
Despite her own ambivalence, Randall has changed her own family’s way of doing things, and makes a public plea:
I call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10 percent of our body weight that often results in a 50 percent reduction in diabetes risk.
In reaction to Randall’s piece, Dr. Maya Rockeymoore of Global Policy Solutions (a program whose purpose is to help policymakers address childhood obesity) exercised her pen The Huffington Post. She reminds us of the often blatant disconnect between opportunities for healthy living and the economic struggles of many black families.
Yes, she says, there are food deserts, entire neighborhoods where fresh healthful food is almost impossible to find. And yes, there is a lot of cunningly devised advertising specifically designed to sell junk food and sugar-sweetened beverages to black youth.
Dr. Rockeymoore sent out word through her online social network to gather opinions, and found agreement on the cultural and environmental aspects. Another factor was also mentioned, one that rings a bell around here at Childhood Obesity News, the food-as-drug paradigm. Check out this quotation:
Could it be possible that my Facebook friends are right when they say that African-American women, who are more likely to live in poverty and the least likely to ever be married, are self-medicating their depression by using food as an opiate? I’m not sure. But I do know that new research pointing to the addictive and toxic properties of sugar are likely to provide further clues about the psychosocial and biomedical aspects of this epidemic in black communities.
It seems that many of this researcher’s informants view the problem through the psychological food dependence-addiction lens. And now, at least to some extent, she does, too.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Across Specialties Over 6% of Children Are Extremely Obese,” Clinical Psychiatry News, 05/10/10
Source: “Black Women and Fat,” The New York Times, 05/05/12
Source: “Are Black Women Obese Because We Want to Be?,” The Huffington Post, 05/08/12
Image of Big Mama Thornton is used under Fair Use: Reporting.
Childhood Obesity Lit
May 9th, 2012
A guy named Steve Almond published a book about sweets, and going by the clues in a review from a blogger called Kim, it sounds ambivalent, if not downright schizophrenic. The title is Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.
According to the reviewer, Steve Almond is really funny, and habitually keeps as many as seven pounds of candy in his home at all times, and his story is like “chocolaty food porn.” But then, there is a quotation from the book, where Almond says:
I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways, and given that much of our citizenry is bordering on obesity (just about what we deserve) and given that most of the folks who grow our sugar and cocoa are part of an indentured Third World workforce who earn enough, per annum, to buy maybe a Snickers bar, and given that the giants of the candy industry are, even as I write this, doing everything in their considerable power to establish freak hegemony over what they call ‘developing markets,’ meaning hooking the children of Moscow and Beijing and Nairobi on their dastardly confections.
Interesting. Meanwhile, from Australia comes a children’s book with a rude title that will not be quoted here, but we will reveal that the author is Sharon Cooper and her day job (along with her husband) is running a nursery that supplies supermarkets with fresh produce. They are against chemical additives, and speak glowingly of their “superfoods” which are full of phytonutrients, substances said to strengthen the immune system and reduce the risk of degenerative diseases.
WebWire passes along a quotation from Cooper:
We want to share our strategies, perfected over years of professional experience, for everything from soil preparation and natural pest control to including superfoods in diets and helping children to understand the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and prevent childhood obesity.
Here is what to expect from the story itself:
This fun-filled book delivers important healthy lifestyle and healthy eating messages to children in a humorous way, through the invention of characters who talk in the language children can relate to. The book follows Superfood Spike’s plight to convince his friend Junkfood Jimmy that junk food is bad for his health…
Kevin McMahon is the author of another children’s book, this one designed to be read to kids ages six to eight, and suitable as a “read alone” book for nine-year-olds and older. It’s titled Manny McMoose and His Chubby Caboose, and Elizabeth Yerkes tells us all about how it came to be written. Author McMahon began life as a fat kid — he was McMoose in real life. One of his concerns is how kids have it even worse today, with cyber-bullying in addition to the face-to-face kind.
In fact, the book’s main topic is bullying, which McMahon knows from personal experience, having been called “Porky” by the neighborhood ice-cream vendor. It’s also, he says, a “classic story of a victim who becomes a hero.”
Now McMahon is a psychologist, working with grade-school kids in a public school system. When he visits schools to give readings from the book, he asks audience members to raise their hands if they have every been bullied for any reason. Generally, four out of five kids admit to having been bullied at some point.
Beth Carswell, in a piece called “The Skinny on Fat in Fiction,” offers a whole page full of obesity-related books, including some with juvenile characters. She mentions the classic, Lord of the Flies, with its character named Piggy, and absolutely disapproves of the stereotyping engaged in by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books. Nor does she like Patti Stren’s I Was a 15-Year-Old Blimp, because:
The main point readers will take away from the book is that she is fat and unhappy at the beginning, and thin and happy at the end.
Blubber, by Judy Blume, earns a much higher approval rating thanks to what Carswell sees as her honest portrayal of bullying in all its ugliness. She also appreciates that Blume’s lessons are not too obvious or preachy. It seems to the reviewer that in contemporary life, overweight is the only remaining socially acceptable target for bigotry. Carswell suggests that in the real world, overweight is incidental, while in fiction, it seems to be a character’s single defining trait:
If a character is fat, it’s a struggle for them, and often the central theme of the book. It often goes hand-in-hand with unflattering character traits, such as laziness, sloppiness or greed… It has been used to demonstrate psychological problems (often to be physically shed later in the story, in symbolic synchronicity with the shedding of the burden of secrets, or shame, or a repressed past)…
When it comes to books written for young people on the subject of obesity, and even fiction with obese characters, there seems to be a wide spectrum of opinion and acceptability. Several posts about them can be found right here at Childhood Obesity News.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Review: Candyfreak by Steve Almond,” Sophisticated Dorkiness, 10/29/10
Source: “Aussie Author Reveals the Secrets to Beating Childhood Obesity in New Book…,” WebWire, 05/07/12
Source: “’McMoose’ turns childhood obesity story into book,” The Westerly Sun, 02/19/11
Source: “The Skinny on Fat in Fiction,” AbeBooks.com
Image by hoyasmeg (James Emery), used under its Creative Commons license.
Childhood Obesity and Family Meals
May 8th, 2012
The importance of family meals was a recent topic here, because many health care professionals believe that having dinner together is a crucial piece of the childhood obesity prevention puzzle. Life is very complicated, and sometimes it’s difficult to separate the strands and understand the cause-and-effect sequence.
Sometimes it’s hard to know for sure where theory ends and certainty begins. One of the problems with the family dinner hypothesis is, there are no instant results. If a family dines together every night for a week, each child will not consequently weigh in a pound lighter the following week.
Doubt can always be cast, and clearly there are instances where family get-togethers are inimical. For instance, a family could sit down together for their evening meal seven days a week and still be a mess. If an authoritarian parent rules with an iron fist, taking every chance to correct and criticize, it does no one any good. Plus, when mealtime is nothing but a stress-fest, the digestion is demonstrably interfered with, and too many other things are already doing that.
Dr. Pretlow writes:
Evidence points to a serious dependence (addiction) on highly pleasurable foods as a significant cause of the childhood obesity epidemic.
Why are some children more prone than others to get hooked on highly engineered, hyperpalatable so-called foods? Because they have emotional difficulties that are temporarily soothed by comfort eating.
Regarded through the psychological food dependence-addiction lens, family meals are a great idea if the atmosphere is relaxed, friendly, cooperative, and otherwise stress-free. If you’re with your favorite people and everybody is cool, that’s the comfort right there. The presence of the clan, all on good terms with each other, is a primal need. People get their nurture from sources other than food. If comfort is coming from association with the nearest and dearest, there is no need to seek it from food.
What can parents do to put things on a better track? One of the secrets of life, we are told, is to take it one day at a time. Children take it one minute at a time. They balk at change when it’s presented as an ironclad program that must be followed forever. Or that’s how they hear it. It sounds oppressive. But when parents cultivate a good attitude, and the children are not already beyond reach, almost anything can happen if it’s presented as a one-time thing. Think up ways to spruce up the family dinner.
Tell a Funny Story About Cats Night. Suggest it a couple of days ahead of time, so people have time to think. A couple of ground rules: Everyone gets to tell their story uninterrupted. And each person thanks the person who has taken a turn before him or her.
Pretend We’re at a Restaurant Night. Use our indoor voices, and eat in a civilized way and act polite.
Tell Something Good About Broccoli Night. You don’t have to eat it, you just have to look it up and tell the rest of the family one good thing about it.
Pretend We’re on an Island Where There’s Nothing to Eat but Vegetables Night. Be sure to take requests.
For the family that wants to “go deep,” detailed instructions can be found on how to make meals that are described as ridiculous and diverting. The goal of food artist Bill Wurtzel is to discourage obesity by inspiring the creation of dishes that are both nutritious and fun.
The Funny Food book contains photos and how-to instructions, and its description says:
In Bill’s world, carrots turn into airplanes; boiled eggs into jugglers, and pears into guitar players. As gracefully as Picasso’s ceramic plates found endless form so do Wurtzel’s portraits which seem to grow out of almost anything — cheerios and bananas; lox and bagels; oatmeal, blueberries, and strawberries. Sometimes you think he is portrait artist and you could swear you just saw Sigmund Freud emerging from a pear or Shakespeare growing out of an apple.
For older kids, maybe a parent could get them interested in the science of why different kinds of vegetables are cut up in different ways for Asian cuisine. There are reasons for all those varied shapes. There are a lot of possibilities, and all it takes is patience, good will, and a little imagination.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Funny Foods,” Funnyfood.us
Image by evris28 (Yana Sedlak), used under its Creative Commons license.
Endless Supply of Ideas for Parents
May 7th, 2012
In today’s media, it seems like one of the easiest things to find is advice on how to raise normal-weight children. The Internet is rife with bullet-point lists of suggestions. Childhood Obesity News has surveyed many such lists.
How many of the helpful ideas are backed up by science? This is not yet clear. Which ones work? It depends on whom you ask. Just about all the tips for parents have one thing in common — if you try it, no harm will be done. And most of them share another characteristic. If your family tries the tip, it might not directly result in slim children, or you may not be able to perceive exactly how that could happen. But it is almost certain to have some other good outcome.
For example, this list was compiled by registered dietician and certified personal trainer Anika Christ:
Get at least 8 hours of sleep
Drink half their body weight in ounces of water — take water to school
Eat at least one meal with their family each day at the kitchen table.
Engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity a day.
Keep screen time to two hours or less.
Eat a high quality breakfast, including protein and fiber.
Just play.
Eat at least 3 vegetables per day.
Every one of those anti-childhood-obesity suggestions is a good idea that will improve a child’s life in some way. No doubt about it. If a family decides to do all those things, and follows through, nothing but good can come of it.
Another contribution to the genre is titled “A surprising answer to slimming down our kids,” written by W. Douglas Tynan, Ph.D., of Jefferson Medical College and Nemours Health & Prevention Services. The problem, as expressed by Dr. Tynan, is:
Having more information isn’t the same as making healthy behavior changes at home.
Have truer words ever been spoken? Many people have noticed this counterproductive aspect of human nature, including the children and teenagers who confide their stories to the Weigh2Rock website. Here is Dr. Pretlow’s description of the first thing he learned from creating Weigh2Rock:
It was assumed that providing information on healthy eating, portion control, and exercise, in conjunction with online peer support, would enable those using the site to attain and maintain healthy weights… Despite demonstrating knowledge of healthy eating and exercise, most youth using the site reported little or no weight loss and some even continued weight gain… In a 3-choice poll asking, ‘Do you think that information on healthy eating helps you to lose weight’, 67% of respondents (n=96) selected ‘No, I am overdosed on healthy eating information — I need info on how to resist cravings.’
Dr. Pretlow believes that the key to childhood obesity prevention is equipping a child with ways to cope with cravings. The essential nature of this need is expressed in the design of his “W8 Loss 2 Go” iPhone application.
But let’s get back to the clinical psychologist’s point of view, and see if there is common ground. Dr. Tynan has known families where parents had a huge responsibility to monitor a child’s diet because of allergies, gastrointestinal problems, diabetes, and other conditions, as well as obesity.
Dr. Tynan knows what an overwhelming struggle it can be. He quotes work done in 2008 by the Endocrine Society that showed that piling on the information can produce only “minimal change,” and says:
Too often, healthcare practitioners (and the media) throw more and more information at concerned parents, confusing facts with behavior change. My experience has been that information overload doesn’t help. Often patients and their families with the most information do the worst… [W]e wind up with very knowledgeable families who do not improve and are often frustrated in their efforts to try and change their lives.
Two large, long-running studies seem to indicate that children’s risk for obesity could be reduced by 40% by doing three things in addition to better food choices and more physical exertion. We will consider these recommendations in the light of their ability to reduce cravings.
The first is, set limits on TV, including computer use. Any kind of screen — two hours per day, max. Can this reduce cravings? Yes. Because every type of media offering, not just network TV, seems to be saturated with enticements to enjoy the pleasure of food. Messages that say, “Eat, eat, eat,” just pour into those little brains all day long. Fewer images of food, fewer sales pitches, fewer cravings.
The second principle is family meals, together, and that means at least five nights per week, not one or two. Effect on cravings? Could go either way. First of all, it’s not always practical because of parents’ work schedules. Factories and mines and hospitals and police departments, and many other businesses work round the clock. There are families where one parent is absent from dinner most nights, for years at a time, and it has always been that way, and it can’t be helped. Yet many children raised in such families grow to adulthood without becoming overweight.
Even when both parents are available and willing to do family dinners, the enforced togetherness can backfire, and there is nothing new about this, either. Many people alive today have nothing but grim memories of family dinners that featured criticism or verbal battles. Since the root of food cravings is emotional, family gatherings that create more emotional damage are toxic. If this ritual is to be health-giving, the atmosphere needs to be good.
The third suggestion is to get children into bed and make sure they have enough sleep, like, for instance, 10.5 hours a night for a four-year-old. In terms of cravings and food, this one is a no-brainer. A sleeping child may dream of sugar plums, but is, at least temporarily, incapacitated to eat them.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “8 house rules for healthier kids,” LifeTime WeightLoss, 09/11/11
Source: “A surprising answer to slimming down our kids,” philly.com, 04/11/12
Source: “Addiction to Highly Pleasurable Food as a Cause of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic: A Qualitative Internet Study,” Eating Disorders, 06/21/11
Image by USDA Gov (U.S. Department of Agriculture), used under its Creative Commons license.
Culture and the Psychology of Scarcity
May 4th, 2012
Childhood Obesity News has been talking about societal forces that make people do what they do, and get in the way of efforts to improve conditions. This is true of many things, including childhood obesity:
Some cultures or societies view body types and images in certain ways — for instance weight is seen as a positive thing in cultures where food is scarce… Obesity can be looked at like a social factor in health and wellbeing when it comes to eating what is being viewed as being positive or that shows affluence.
This page from ACS Distance Education also notes that eating junk food can be a status symbol, probably because most of it comes from America, and there are still plenty of third-world nations where the indigenous poor are deluded enough to think anything that comes from America is magic.
Cultural influences on body image issues can stem from political upheavals, too. Any parents who have lived in a war zone or a refugee camp or famine area at some point, will overfeed their kids any time they get a chance. When parents have been in an actual war, the health care establishment’s enthusiasm for the war on obesity is unlikely to cut much ice or butter many parsnips.
The name of Eritrea is, to many minds, practically a synonym for famine. But the country’s government drew criticism from all over the world last year by denying that there was any food shortage within its borders. Other sources estimated that two out of three Eritreans were hungry, and confirmed that 900 refugees a month were crossing into Ethiopia.
Imagine how bad things would have to be at home for anyone to see Ethiopia as an improvement! And many people from this part of the world, displaced by war or famine, make it as far as the Western nations.
For EthnoMed, Dorothy Cooper and Aisling Underwood studied the ways of Eritreans who emigrate to Western countries. Babies are breastfed for up to a year, but mothers often add solid foods as early as four months, which is early, according to American pediatricians.
The best baby is a fat baby, and portly adults are admired. It proves that the family is able to afford not only enough food, but extra. It’s a much more reliable status symbol than cars or clothes. If you’re a guest of an Eritrean family, it’s good form to eat every morsel you are given, and never turn down anything that is offered.
What does this mean in terms of the social workers and health car personnel who deal with Eritrean immigrants? The authors say:
The decrease in exercise and change in familiar foods leads to a rise in obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. There is a need to explain the concept of a healthy diet, portion control, and exercise. It should not be assumed that everyone has a good understanding of ‘healthy’ American eating habits.
An article appeared in the New Statesman more than 10 years ago, which is probably still relevant today, given the glacial speed of change in most bureaucracies. At any rate, it is illustrative of the endlessly varied circumstances that caring individuals and agencies run up against when trying to do good work “in the field,” which is another way of saying “out there, where any bizarre thing can happen.”
Susanne Jaspers worked as an emergency nutritionist in an Albanian camp that housed people displaced by the Balkan hostilities, and what struck her as bizarre was the number of overweight residents, particularly from Kosovo, an area whose sovereignty is still in question. Jaspers wrote:
They did not look like the refugees I was used to, the victims of African crises whose skeletal limbs and emaciated figures haunt television viewers the world over… It became clear that the main nutritional problem among Kosovars was not under-nutrition, but obesity. This was confirmed by a nutritional survey in January 2000 in Kosovo which found that, while only 5.3 per cent of adult women were undernourished, 23.6 per cent were overweight and 10.4 per cent were obese. Among the elderly (both sexes), 32 per cent were overweight and 16 per cent obese.
Colleagues working in Bosnia confirmed her observations. The traditional diet in the entire area includes plenty of animal products, and for a variety of reasons it was always possible to be fat and poor at the same time. In the camp where Jaspers worked, she experienced inner conflict over two issues. One was the unfair distribution of donated food among various populations worldwide. The greatest help was not applied to the greatest need.
The other cause for unease was based on the physicians’ rule, “First, do no harm.” Nutritionists are not supposed to fly into a place and weed out potentially harmful substances, even if they are edible. This was the problem:
The quantity and types of food provided to some Kosovars while they were refugees was exceptional. The UN used the same procedures to work out food-aid needs as elsewhere, but numerous agencies decided to use private funds to purchase food. Meanwhile, many donor countries provided funding direct to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to buy additional foods; and donations — ranging from Mars bars, Italian cakes, pains au chocolat, Turkish delight, as well as healthier alternatives such as milk, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables — arrived in NATO planes… How can we justify providing high-cost food items to Europeans who were not undernourished when, in most African crises, we cannot even provide undernourished populations with a basic survival ration?
Meanwhile, the tendency of people to leave for other parts of the globe has brought 20,000 Nigerians to Ireland, where they continue with their old custom of breastfeeding babies for at least a year. But after this good start, the kids get the customary high-fat, high-starch diet, with meat whenever possible, and the efforts of government health care workers encounter cultural resistance:
More traditionally minded persons view obesity as positive.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “AGS Distance Education,” AGS Distance Education website
Source: “Drought in Eritrea: Hunger despite government denials,” BBC News, 09/04/11
Source: “Eritrean Cultural Profile,” EthnoMed, 06/16/10
Source: “Don’t let them eat cake,” New Statesman, 05/15/00
Source: “Nigeria,” Spirasi.ie
Image by DavidDennisPhotos.com (David Dennis), used under its Creative Commons license.
