Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Why the Caloric Conundrum Matters

Pat Hartman October 1, 2020 1 Comment

“3,500 calories equal one pound of fat” has been an accepted principle for some time now, but its fans are abandoning the team. We saw how Dr. Zoe Harcombe called for the obesity specialists to get together and admit that the formula does not hold up at all times and in all places.

Shannon Ashley published a piece with a rude title on Medium.com, but the subtitle conveys more purpose. She wants the world to know that “Morbid obesity is bigger than gluttony or laziness,” and makes the argument. First, when experts define weight loss as “the sum of eating less and moving more,” obese people get a really bad message, namely, that they are being blamed for something they can’t change.

But there seems to be more to it. Ashley writes,

I’m positive that if obesity and weight loss were a cut and dry simple science, most everyone would lose the weight and keep it off. And the experts would agree about why we get fat and exactly what we can do about it.

One thing Ashley wants the world to know, is that many morbidly obese people actually do have legitimate medical conditions — in her case, an endocrine disorder called Central Precocious Puberty, and another one called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). PCOS, she says, has been scientifically proven to cause the patient’s body to actually burn fewer calories than normal people.

And then, there is lipedema, “a poorly understood condition where your calves and thighs (and eventually, upper arms) collect unusual fat deposits which do not respond to proper diet and exercise.” The author says,

When I learned a couple years ago that I have lipedema, I sank into a deep depression because suddenly, I had no hope of ever having “normal” legs. No matter how much weight I lose, I will still have legs… well, legs like tree trunks. That devastated me for a very long time…

Yes, I have tried Keto, low carb, zero carb, fasting, vegan, intermittent fasting, and LCHF in the past 4+ years, but I never get below 340 pounds.

Calories don’t just provide energy like a battery, they provide vitamins — like food — because they are food, and they are meant to be the source of the essential substance needed by every body system. Choosing to ingest calories paired with harmful substances, or no substances, rather than the chemicals the body needs is suicide. There are even theories about how the typical American diet can physically change the brain in ways that impair its ability to regulate appetite.

For many years, Sean Croxton hosted the popular fitness podcast Underground Wellness. He is a functional diagnostic nutritionist and has a degree in kinesiology. As a health advisor, he dutifully repeated to clients all the received wisdom about calories and energy exchange, but “it obviously wasn’t working.”

Being a person who “really cares whether people get results or not,” Croxton started reading up on the subject, and says,

You know, calories in, calories out, really isn’t how it works. If it really worked that way, I don’t think we would have the obesity epidemic that we have because the solution would be pretty darn simple. Eat less and move more.

He realized that when someone wants to lose weight, there is always more to it. On a deeper level, there are aspects of their lives they want to fix, that the “eat less and move more” recipe simply cannot address. People don’t really want to just lose weight. Many overweight and obese people would be just fine with their size, if their size was the only issue. Croxton says,

You want everything, right? Okay, cool, then we have to go beyond the diet and exercise component and fix some of these dysfunction that’s going on in your body. You need something that’s customized for you, that’s what most people need. Most people are following this cookie cutter deal and you know there are different solutions for different people.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “How The F**k Does A Person Get To Be 400 Pounds?,” Medium.com, 02/27/19
Source: “The Dark Side of Fat Loss with Sean Croxton,” Bulletproof Radio, 08/28/11
Image by Steve Jurvetson/CC BY 2.0

That Magic Number 3,500

Pat Hartman September 30, 2020 1 Comment

One of the most cherished “facts” in the obesity field is that 3,500 calories equal one pound of body weight, and consequently, to lose a pound a week, a person has to cut their intake by 500 calories per day. But how did the experts come up with this formulation? What makes them so sure?

In order for this to be accepted, says obesity researcher Dr. Zoe Harcombe, Ph.D.,

There needs to be overwhelming, irrefutable and consistent evidence that each and every time a deficit of 3,500 calories is created, one pound of fat is lost.

She decided to look into that, and went through a hilariously lengthy process of asking various bureaus and agencies where the figure came from. Here is what she ended up with:

The organisations approached have been helpful and accessible, but none is able to explain where the 3,500 comes from, let alone to provide evidence of its validity.

Her solution would be to require that proof of the formula be furnished, and proof not only that it works, but that it works across the board. Or else announce that it is inaccurate, and move on. Why? Because…

We need to tell people that there is no formula when it comes to weight loss and we have been wrong in giving people the hope that starvation will lead to the loss of 104 pounds each and every year, in fat alone.

Of course there was a lot of pushback. The page’s comments section is bursting with arguments telling Harcombe how wrong she is. Anyone interested in the topic can find plenty there to cogitate on.

When researching weight loss myths, journalist Liz Neporent spoke with Diana Thomas, director of the Center for Quantitative Obesity Research, about the generally accepted idea that a person has to burn (or not consume) 3,500 calories to lose one pound of body weight. Thomas said,

Clicking off 3,500 calories to lose a pound may be close enough to the truth for the first 10 to 12 days of a diet as you lose water weight, but when the body weight drops you carry less mass and start to burn fewer calories for the same activities. After a period of time, you stop losing weight even if you continue to cut back by the same amount.

So, in that sense, a calorie is not a calorie. And belief in that formula causes psychological devastation to aspiring weight losers. A more recent exploration of the 3,500-calories-per-pound theory is offered by RunnersWorld.com journalist Amby Burfoot, who says….

[…] the body is an organic whole, and has many reactions to changes in calories, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, metabolism, exercise, hydration, and hormones.

When you’re making a lifestyle change through diet, almost all these interrelated events conspire to lower your daily metabolic rate through a process known as “metabolic adaptation.” As a result, a daily deficit of 500 calories produces slightly less effect on each subsequent day. The difference isn’t big at first, but grows substantially with longer periods of time, producing just 50 percent of the expected weight loss over 12 months.

Burfoot also answers the eternal question: What is the optimal weight loss program? Turns out, it’s “the one you can adhere to over the long term.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Calorie Theory — prove it or lose it,” ZoeHarcombe.com, 06/08/14
Source: “6 Weight Loss Myths Debunked,” ABCNews.go.com, 07/02/13
Source: “How Many Calories Are in a Pound? Well, It’s Complicated,” RunnersWorld.com, 06/10/20
Image by goblinbox/CC BY 2.0

The Caloric Emptiness Trope

Pat Hartman September 29, 2020 1 Comment

So, we were talking about how Americans have not changed much in the past decade, and still procure their empty calories from pretty much the same foods as they did in 2010. According to one school of thought, as long as a person inputs an energy source for the body to “burn,” what does it matter? In a pure energy-balance sense, maybe a calorie is just a calorie. In or out, it’s a unit of energy, and according to strict interpretation, the calorie supplies the fuel and does the work. End of story.

The problem with that is, a person could easily consume 2,000 calories worth of substances and obtain zero nutrients. Many chronic health conditions are nutrition-related. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a list of them:

Cardiovascular health
Metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, and diabetes
Growth, size, and body composition, including overweight and obesity
Reduced muscle strength and bone mass
Gestational diabetes mellitus
Chronic liver disease
Cancer
Dental health
Food allergy

Discussed here, of course, is the third item, the one about overweight and obesity. If nutrition matters, then food should contain nutritional elements, because where else are we going to get them? Some calories come with useful ingredients that help the body and mind do all the things they need to do besides grossly burn energy. Calories that don’t bring along these vital components are so inferior, they are sometimes called “empty.”

According to a very recent study, about one-fourth of the calories consumed by children are empty. In clarifying this issue, Dr. Edwina Wambogo of the National Cancer Institute named…

[…] the main culprits of these so-called empty calories as being soft and fruit drinks, cookies, brownies, pizza and ice cream.

This list is reminiscent of a poll from Dr. Pretlow’s Weigh2Rock website where kids themselves revealed the foods that cause them the most trouble, and that they perceive as the most addictive. These include chips, chocolate, ice cream, cookies, cakes, fast food, and pizza.

Of course, the older kids get, the bigger a percentage of empty calories they ingest. Also, children like their empty calories in drinkable form, while teens transition to solid empty calories. This seems counterintuitive, given the number of teens who always carry around a bottle of some liquid.

Here is a useful quotation from one of the many nutrition-oriented sites on the Web:

This is not about the quantity of food available at meals. And it’s not about forced exercise. It never was. It’s about the quality of our food.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Scientific Report of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee,” DietaryGuidelines.gov, 2020
Source: “New Study, A Quarter of Calories that Children and Teens Eat May Come from Added Sugars and Fats,” AICR.org, 07/15/20
Source: “Shocking Childhood Obesity Trends — and Still Going Up!,” DietDoctor.com, 04/27/16
Image by Jo N/CC BY 2.0

The Caloric Conundrum

Pat Hartman September 28, 2020 2 Comments

The fetishization of calories by generations of weight-conscious eaters seems to have brought disaster. Even with the help of fancy technology, people just don’t seem able to keep energy consumption on a leash. There is a happy medium between compulsively counting every calorie, and ignoring the whole issue. It’s easy to learn a repertoire of basic healthful foods and stick with them, in reasonable amounts, and get pretty much the same result with less stress.

The U.S. government’s 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee vindicates its existence by describing in elaborate detail how much worse child obesity is now than it was last week, month, and year.

A decade ago, the 2010 version of the same committee published a list of the top 10 sources of calories in the American diet, replicated here in its glorious entirety:

1. Grain-based desserts (cakes, cookies, donuts, pies, crisps, cobblers, and granola bars)
2. Yeast breads
3. Chicken and chicken-mixed dishes
4. Soda, energy drinks, and sports drinks
5. Pizza
6. Alcoholic beverages
7. Pasta and pasta dishes
8. Mexican mixed dishes
9. Beef and beef-mixed dishes
10. Dairy desserts

The 2020 report says,

The American dietary landscape has not changed appreciably in recent decades. Across the life course, it is characterized by a persistent overconsumption of total energy (i.e., calories), saturated fats, salt, added sugars, and alcoholic beverages among a high proportion of those who choose to drink.

The current lineup is not exactly parallel to the 2010 list, because it has been broken down into categories, namely, solid fats and added sugars, which are food components “of public health concern.” Also, there is more differentiation between age groups. In the solid fats area, the worst obesity villains are burgers and sandwiches; desserts and sweet snacks.

For all Americans older than two years, “mixed dishes” are the top source of energy intake. In general, we’re talking about casseroles, stews, frozen dinners, lasagna and other pasta dishes, meat pies, vegetarian pies, and even pizza. Every culture has its specialties, and in reality there are as many mixed dishes as there are cooks.

The second largest category differs by age. For kids from two through 19, the number-two villain is snacks/sweets. The report is replete with horrifying facts, for instance,

Beverages provide almost 1 out of every 7 calories consumed by U.S. youth ages 2 to 19 years.

Rather than counting, it might be useful to pay more attention to the end result of introducing these varying kinds of calories, whose nutritional qualities differ, into the body.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Scientific Report of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee,” DietaryGuidelines.gov, 2020
Source: “What Americans Eat: Top 10 sources of calories in the U.S. diet,” Harvard.edu, 2010
Source: “Scientific Report of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee,” DietaryGuidelines.gov, 2020
Image by franchise opportunities/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — History’s Long Shadow Affects Health

Pat Hartman September 25, 2020 No Comments

What most Americans know about sickle cell disease is that only black people get it. Like many nuggets of commonly known information, this is inaccurate. There are other demographics with an elevated instance of sickle cell trait:

[…] not just African Americans, but also Latin Americans from Central and South America and people of Middle Eastern, Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean descent.

To carry the sickle cell “trait” means a person has one copy of the mutated gene. In practical terms, they might spend an entire life without really running into difficulty. They probably should be extra careful about who they have children with, because if both parents carry the gene, trouble may ensue. Now, a new factor has entered the equation.

The previous Childhood Obesity News post discussed how people of color pay a disproportionate price for catching the novel coronavirus, and how this is especially true if they are obese. Now it looks as if possessing the sickle cell trait, in combination with COVID-19, can be deadly. Folks from the aforementioned groups who catch the virus may need extra interventions, like blood transfusions, anticoagulant medication, and oxygen.

Journalist Usha Lee McFarling writes,

The Medical College of Wisconsin has created a national registry to track infected sickle cell patients, and while the data are not conclusive, they so far suggest having sickle cell disease may lead to worse outcomes and a higher risk of death.

The science on this is not yet solid, but it begins to look as if “that might be one reason the virus is disproportionately sickening and killing Black Americans.” People who believe this might affect them can obtain more information and advice from the Sickle Cell Disease News website.

All along, the United Kingdom has been more straightforward about admitting that historical racism has a lot to do with the reasons why certain populations are more endangered. The shorthand notation there is BAME — Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic. Health writer Denis Campbell said of a controversial government study,

The main report found that people from black ethnic groups were most likely to be diagnosed with Covid-19 and those from BAME groups overall had the highest death rates. Those of Bangladeshi origin faced the highest risk of dying — twice that of white Britons — while people of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, other Asian, Caribbean and other black backgrounds faced an extra risk ranging between 10% and 50%.

Racism and discrimination suffered by Britain’s black, Asian and minority ethnic people has contributed to the high death rates from Covid-19 in those communities, an official inquiry has found.

For a pair of very useful resources, readers may want to consult two pages from APM Research Lab. The first, packed with facts, is titled “The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.” The other, “The Color of Coronavirus Response Panel,” is a collection of reactions to those facts from 10 experts.

One eye-opening example is from Philadelphia pediatric surgeon Dr. Ala Stanford:

It was disheartening to learn in my age group that I am six times more likely to die than someone who is 10 years older than me and White. It doesn’t matter that I’m a doctor or educated or that I have good insurance. This is not about income; this is about color. The virus does not discriminate; however, the people in the institutions that control whether you are tested, what resources are allocated to you, and how and if you are treated for coronavirus may discriminate — and it has the same deleterious effects on the African-American community.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Millions of Americans carry the sickle cell trait, many without knowing it…,” StateNews.com, 09/03/20
Source: “Racism contributed to disproportionate UK BAME coronavirus deaths, inquiry finds,” TheGuardian.com, 06/14/20
Source: “The Color of Coronavirus Response Panel,” APMResearchLab.org, undated
Image: Public Domain

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism

Pat Hartman September 24, 2020 1 Comment

About the novel coronavirus, one of the earliest misconceptions to gain traction was that children are neither in danger, nor dangerous. The public was told that kids are unlikely to catch COVID-19, and even less likely to pass it around.

At a certain point it became clear that children do catch it, and not only that, but obese children are at higher risk of catching it. And, as usual, any kind of adversity that affects children takes on an extra dimension when the children affected belong to ethnic minorities, or are living in situations of economic stress. This is true of both obesity and COVID-19.

The obesity numbers alone are daunting. The Centers for Disease Control published data from the years 2017 to 2019, and here are some of the findings. This is what kids in these communities are growing up seeing around them and accepting as normal:

Non-Hispanic Black adults had the highest prevalence of self-reported obesity (39.8%), followed by Hispanic adults (33.8%), and non-Hispanic White adults (29.9%).

6 states had an obesity prevalence of 35 percent or higher among non-Hispanic White adults.

15 states had an obesity prevalence of 35 percent or higher among Hispanic adults.

34 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.) had an obesity prevalence of 35 percent or higher among non-Hispanic Black adults.

At the end of last year, Dr. Mary T. Bassett gave a TED talk on “How Does Racism Affect Your Health?” She speaks often on the topics of vulnerable communities and health inequities that stem from geography, income, race, and occupation. She says,

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit underserved populations and communities of color particularly hard, exacerbating longstanding health disparities in the U.S.

The renowned Dr. Anthony Fauci has spoken with the press in great detail about these matters.

An extensive study, published in the journal Pediatrics, is described by Catherine Pearson, in her HuffPo.com article, as exposing “stark racial and socioeconomic disparities” and “striking differences” in the effects of COVID-19 on kids of different ethnicities. The subjects were 1,000 humans, age 22 at the oldest who were…

[…] brought to a drive-through COVID-19 testing site in the spring with relatively mild symptoms. Overall, roughly 20% of the children tested positive. But just about 7% of white children tested positive, whereas 30% of Black children and more than 45% of Latinx children did. The median age of kids who tested positive was 11 years.

The author emphasizes that this is only, figuratively speaking, a snapshot. All that is known about these children and youth comes from a brief span of their lives. The most important part of the story might be what is going on with them in 10 years, which of course we cannot know. It is also a snapshot in space, specifically, Washington, D.C., which should not be extrapolated upon to make implications about any other place.

Pearson quotes study researcher Dr. Monika Goyal, who says, “Chipping away at racial and socioeconomic disparities is a massive, ‘multifactorial’ endeavor….” There’s that word again! Everything is super-complicated and intertwined.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19,” CDC.gov, undated
Source: “Mary T. Bassett featured in The Forum’s Coronavirus Pandemic Series,” Harvard.edu, 05/01/20
Source: “The First Data On Kids, COVID-19 And Race Is Here — And It’s Not Good,” HuffPost.com, 08/05/20
Image by Joey Zanotti/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Obesity, Poverty, Race, and COVID-19

Pat Hartman September 23, 2020 No Comments

Slowly and painfully, the world is learning more about the SARS-CoV-2 organism and its ways. An area related to both children and adults is race, where the numbers cannot be mashed down into comfortable conformity. Robert Roy Britt mentions that research published earlier this year…

[…] found Covid-19 death rates among black people and Hispanics much higher (92.3 and 74.3 deaths per 100,000 population, respectively) than among whites (45.2) or Asians (34.5).
In Chicago, nearly 70% of Covid-19 deaths have been among black people, who make up 30% of the population.

In a way, it makes sense, given that the virus is attracted to obese humans. Of the children who have gotten sick and/or died, roughly three out of four had something else medically out of order.

Often the underlying problem is obesity. Children from low-income households tend to be obese. Hispanic, Black, and Native American children tend to be obese. Obesity, poverty, and minority group membership are factors that work in concert to provide the “perfect storm” situation for COVID-19.

Journalists Jane Greenhalgh and Pati Neighmond explain the ramifications of a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. Researchers defined a time period (February 12 to July 31, 2020) and within it, counted the coronavirus patients under the age of 21 that the CDC was able to know about. They found a “staggering racial disparity”:

Of the children who died, 78% were children of color: 45% were Hispanic, 29% were Black and 4% were non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native.

The intersection of race with poverty and obesity is a sterling example of how the multifactorial nature of a societal issue can cause endless complications when the time comes for solving that problem. The troubled populations deal with crowded living conditions, food insecurity, constant anxiety about housing, and various forms of discrimination.

As Britt points out, minority workers can’t be choosey about where and when they work, and probably don’t have paid sick leave. Too often, because they are seen as infinitely replaceable, employers do not make an effort to protect them from contagion.

Too much going on

Many critics have pointed out what they perceive as a major problem, namely, the refusal of scientists to accept that “normal” weight for one ethnic group simply may not be the norm for another. Bias is so prevalent that even trained, educated professionals do not recognize it in themselves.

Ed Yong, for The Atlantic, spoke of “medical gaslighting,” in which physical distress is “downplayed as a psychological problem such as stress or anxiety.” Some heads are infested by nonsense, like the belief that dark-skinned people do not feel pain as acutely as others, which causes a legitimate need for medication to be dismissed as “drug-seeking behavior.” Yong spoke with a Black woman whose COVID-19 symptoms were processed by two different emergency rooms under the assumption that her problem was a drug overdose.

Genetic, economic, and societal factors need to be examined, in addition to even more basic examples of ignorance that really need to be revisited before any determinations about race are made. Adding insult to injury, CNN reported that “much of the state and federal data on Covid-19 deaths are preliminary and information on race and ethnicity still isn’t available for tens of thousands of cases.”

Even worse, people have been misinformed by authorities. Americans, for instance, labored for some time under the delusion that children are practically immune to COVID-19, and if they do become infected, it’s no big deal. How can we protect children of any color from sickness or death, if we don’t even acknowledge the possibility that they can catch the disease?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Stark Look at Covid-19 and Racial Disparities,” Medium.com, 05/14/20
Source: “The Majority Of Children Who Die From COVID-19 Are Children Of Color,” NPR.org, 09/16/20
Source: “Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19,” TheAtlantic.com, 08/19/20
Source: “Coronavirus continued to spread among San Francisco’s low-income Hispanic population despite lockdown, study finds,” CNN.com, 06/18/20
Image by Yuri Samoilov/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Youth and COVID-19

Pat Hartman September 22, 2020 1 Comment

For NBC News, reporters Olivia Sumrie and Willem Marx recorded the long and painful history of teenager Nia Haughton’s bout with the new coronavirus. Once her lungs had improved, her brain turned on her, producing seizures, life-like hallucinations, and, according to her mother, “a completely different personality.” She was re-hospitalized with the diagnosis of encephalitis, or brain inflammation.

The thing about children and young adults is, their brains are still developing. Experience with Haughton and other pediatric patients caused Dr. Ming Lim to tell the journalists,

I think that COVID has taught us that every time we feel complacent, that we know the spectrum, a new spectrum sort of evolves. We worry that the long-term effect would be in essentially brain growth…

Some kids are getting Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, or MIS-C. The full description of the physical pain and mental distress caused by this condition is horrifying. Sure, it’s rare (at the moment, anyway) but it’s really quite destructive, and so new that nobody has a clue what to expect, five or 10 years down the line.

Kids are coming out of COVID-19 with weird kinks in their nervous systems. Apparently, no one emerges from the disease with experiences anything like what the information disseminated by the government has led us to believe. According to the Centers for Disease Control “guidelines,” people should get better after two to six weeks.

But many entities disobey CDC guidelines, and the virus is one of them. Most of the descriptions are written by adults, thousands of whom have joined internet support groups. This is a small fragment of one message from Dani Oliver:

Neurological symptoms.

I had delirium & hallucinations. Many report tingling all over their body, an internal “buzzing” or “vibrating.” Also, insomnia & chronic hypnic bodily jerks… [W]aking up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath. I also experienced tremors while trying to sleep, like someone was shaking the bed. Also: many report a “hot head.”

Then, there’s the confusion. The “brain fog.” I couldn’t read or make sense of text at times. I couldn’t remember words. I’d stare […] at a loss for what I needed to communicate, or how to do it.

Just imagine how much worse all this is for a young person. Especially for an obese young person, the kind who is most likely to contract the virus. It’s one thing to go to a party, feel like garbage for a day, and then get on with life. But it’s a whole different experience to feel lousy day after day after day, never knowing when it might end.

Worse yet are the false hopes. Oliver emphasizes how the most important thing to know is that “recovery is non-linear.” For the typical “long-haul” patient, their chart of improvement is as jagged as a dragon’s dentition. She writes,

It’s not “well, a tiny fraction of people die, and most people are better in two weeks.” This is simply untrue. So many of us have suffered for months.

Dr. Robert Stevens of Johns Hopkins is quoted as saying,

People who survive will recover from the respiratory failure, they’ll recover from the kidney disease, but the imprint on the brain is likely to be much more long-lasting.

Journalist Alexandra Sifferlin recounted the takeaway from a new CDC report that examined 391,814 cases of COVID-19 among patients younger than 21. This group chalked up only 121 deaths, so far, but because of the “long-haul” potential that becomes increasingly evident and documented, the trend is unsettling.

An ever-growing number of scientists are beginning to trace the outlines of expectations when it comes to children and youth, and their scenarios don’t even begin to approach the worst-case level. We are talking about a patient population with, supposedly, their whole lives ahead of them. Eventually, scientific research might catch up enough to supply meaningful longitudinal assessments. By then, for a lot of young people, it will be too late.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID-19 and children: Doctors see link between virus and neurological side effects,” NBCNnews.com, 08/06/20
Source: Dani Oliver via Twitter.com, 07/03/20
Source: “Black, Hispanic, and American Indian Children Make Up Most Covid-19 Deaths Among Kids,” Medium.com, 09/18/20
Image by Dan Gaken/CC BY-ND 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — COVID-19 Worse Than Freshman 15

Pat Hartman September 21, 2020 No Comments

For years, a popular urban legend has been the fabled “Freshman 15,” the number of pounds rumored to be gained by the average new college student coping with the stress of change, and the consumption of massive quantities of beer.

The National Institutes of Health website even includes a scientific report on this subject. The method was an online survey of a small number of unmarried freshmen who lived in dorms at a private university in America (the Northeast, specifically.) It found that about half the respondents gained weight — the men more so than the women — and that the average gain was nowhere near 15 pounds, but a bit less than three pounds. However, this was 5.5 times as much as weight gain experienced during the same time frame by the general population of individuals who were not college freshmen.

Obviously, this was not a stop-the-presses news item. But today, many students long for the good old days when gaining 15 pounds, or even 2.7 pounds, was the worst fate they potentially faced.

The bad new days

This year, the introduction of college freshmen to the realm of higher education is more fraught with tension and danger than ever before. Colleges are, quite frankly, a mess. First, a glance at various social media helps to piece together a tale of students virtually imprisoned in their dorms or sorority houses by school authorities who are, according to students, ridiculously and unwarrantedly afraid of the virus.

A mother unleashes an angry tirade against the university that forces young people into quarantine even if they have no coronavirus symptoms, or if they have already had the virus and recovered. That objection shows a certain amount of ignorance, since it is widely known that asymptomatic people carry the virus, and can even be “superspreaders.”

The part about having recovered is even more dicey, since nobody seems quite sure that there is such a thing as immunity, let alone how it functions. Worse yet, the suspicion exists that SARS-CoV-2 can “hide out” in a human body, presenting a clean test score while waiting to perform a trick known as “recrudescence.” Apparently, no scientists anywhere really have a handle on that question yet.

In a worst-case example of uninformed hubris, one anonymous online commenting parent insisted that the kids are rightfully outraged about being overprotected from a disease “THEY KNOW is not a major risk to them.” Even if the risk were minimal to college-age youth, their indifference to spreading the virus around among teaching staff, other campus employees, and townies is breathtakingly selfish.

Plenty of disregard to go around

Not to single out the State University of New York system, because others are equally troubled, but here are some brief highlights from a recent New York Times report by Amanda Rosa, whose title alone tells the story: “A Few Students Threw Parties. Now an Entire SUNY Campus Is Shut Down.”

She relates how, less than a week into the school year, SUNY Oneonta suspended five party-hosting students. People started testing positive. In an effort to protect the uninfected students and local residents, the state sent in eight case investigators and 71 contact tracers, to no avail. Rosa says,

But it was already too late.

Five days later, the outbreak was out of control, with more than 500 virus cases among a campus student population that is usually around 6,000.

As a result, officials announced on Thursday that they were canceling in-person classes for the fall semester and sending students home…

Since Childhood Obesity News is mainly concerned with children, we will not go into the massive amounts of college-opening news from all over the country, but one early August article concerning Indiana’s Purdue University was quite predictive.

In June, the University Senate had polled professors, staff, and graduate students, 7,234 of them to be precise, and half of those people said they would not feel safe returning to campus in the fall. Almost none of the respondents believed that, outside of classes, their fellow students would do anything that even approximated “social distancing.” The administration drew up the Protect Purdue Pledge, but a Student Government poll revealed that nine out 10 students thought no one, outside school hours and off school property, would follow any rules.

And these are our best and brightest, the leaders of tomorrow. If expectations are so abysmally low among supposedly rational, supposedly intelligent people who are almost grownups, what can be expected from elementary, middle and high-school kids?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Freshman 15: Is it Real?,” NIH.gov, 09/09/08
Source: “A Few Students Threw Parties. Now an Entire SUNY Campus Is Shut Down,”
NYTimes.com, 09/09/20
Source: “Purdue students: Likely to return when campus reopens, not confident in classmates to wear masks, social distance,” JConLine.com, 07/05/20
Image by University of the Fraser Valley/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Ultra-Processed Foods Awareness Surges

Pat Hartman September 18, 2020 No Comments

The previous post mentioned The Irish Times journalist Conor Pope, on the subject of how much harm can be done when children’s sleep patterns are truncated or interrupted. Sleep is not the only factor Pope mentions. Kids do a lot of things while staying awake until unprecedented hours, and one of those things is eat. Chances are, they are not preparing salads with the aim of delivering optimal amounts of nutrients to their brains and other organs. No. In the hope of overcoming boredom and anxiety, they are stuffing into their faces anything that is available.

In terms of how much fat they potentially add to the body, all calories may be created equal; but the vitamins, minerals, etc., that calories bring along are not neutral. Some foods supply ingredients necessary for successful growth. Some promote a general sense of well-being that lays the groundwork for beneficial activities like exercise. Some nutrients buttress the immune system, and may even help to prevent contagious diseases from invading the body.

Ireland’s Safefood agency issued a report on what has been happening there since the pandemic caused school closures. According to the report, 43% of school-age children — and that’s almost half — are either staying up later or sleeping later. Because of how this affects the production of appetite hormones, among other reasons, pediatricians are not happy. Pope says of the report,

It also shows that, as a direct result of children experiencing changes in their sleep routine, 49 per cent are eating more unhealthy snacks or treats, 54 per cent are less active and 67 per cent are engaging in more screen-time, all of which can contribute to childhood obesity.

In the United States, schools were in trouble even before COVID-19 awareness really began to take hold. People-feeding programs of all kinds are constantly on the chopping block. Congress has been arguing for years about the nutrition standards for school meals which are, wrote journalist Evie Blad, “necessary to combat concerns like childhood obesity.”

Early in the year, a blow was struck on behalf of hungry children when a federal court ruled that the current administration had violated the Administrative Procedures Act and must leave the school meals nutrition standards alone. Then, it was announced that the U.S. will stop funding a World Health Organization program that addresses both forms of malnutrition, the kind that causes stunted growth and the kind that paradoxically leads to ever-rising levels of child obesity.

Meanwhile, another problem was developing, described by the title of a recent article: “Ultra-Processed Food Consumption among the Paediatric Population: An Overview and Call to Action from the European Childhood Obesity Group.” This organization defines UPFs as:

[…] ready-to-eat formulations of processed substances that have been extracted or refined from whole foods and that typically contain added flavours, colours, and other cosmetic additives, with little, if any, whole food remaining…

[…] high in free sugars, saturated fat, and sodium, and low in protein, dietary fibre, micronutrients and phytochemicals…

[…] highly palatable, energy dense, with a high glycaemic load…

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “More junk food for children as Covid disrupts sleep patterns,” TheStreetJournal.org, 08/20/20
Source: “School Meals: Court Strikes Down Trump Rollback of Nutrition Standards,” EdWeek.org, 04/14/20
Source: “Suffer the Children! Trump’s decision to halt WHO funding will hurt the most vulnerable in developing countries,” MEAWW.com, 04/15/20
Source: “Ultra-Processed Food Consumption among the Paediatric Population: An Overview and Call to Action from the European Childhood Obesity Group,” Karger.com, 04/28/20
Image by therealbrute and Quinn Dombrowski/CC BY-SA 2.0

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