Blake Hammond Brings on the Fat Jokes

It is always interesting to hear fat jokes from an obese comedian (others, not so much.) For anyone who works in the field of obesity prevention or alleviation, an overweight standup comic’s act might contain useful insights and even revelations.

For Blake Hammond, who bills himself as “Cincinnati’s premier fat comedian,” it all started when he was a small and “somewhat sickly” child, ditching first grade to stay home and watch Saturday Night Live reruns. He especially liked the Weekend Update segments, and later, after earning a degree in journalism, he became a freelance writer of reviews and features. But his reviews somehow tended to turn into roasts.

Accepting that he mainly wanted to write jokes, he started to dabble in live comedy by going up at open mics. At the same time, he was working intermittently at a restaurant, which enabled him to keep a finger on the pulse of what everyday people were thinking about, which is useful knowledge for anyone who puts together a comedy routine. With another comic, Jeremy Johnston, he co-hosts a podcast whose format is “two fat guys on a couch talking.”

Self-image and other issues

Hammond variously describes himself as a guy who looks like an Easter egg, a failed celebrity chef, or Jabba the Hutt. He talks about being picked on in grade school, “but I was fat, so I deserved it.” He recalls the marriage proposal he made: “I got down on my knee and my girlfriend called 911.”

He objects to the term “person of size” because it abbreviates to POS, the same initials as a very rude insult. (Sadly, his funniest fat jokes are not suitable for repetition here.) And there are dark hints. Hammond told an interviewer that he suffers from “crippling anxiety,” and he has referenced suicide. He talks about fat nightmares, which include shopping at the Big and Tall store and being weighed by the doctor.

Of course, if a certain type of crime occurs, there is an advantage to being fat, because “If they find a body on a hiking trail, they’re not going to come looking for me.”

For more on the intersection of obesity and comedy, see these posts:

“How Funny Is Obesity, Anyway?”
“A Strange Fellowship”
“Edutainment and Jim Gaffigan’s Books”
“Hefty Humor”
“Is Laughter Always Good Medicine?”
“Lisa Lampanelli and Stuffed”
“Mindy and Monica”
“‘Insatiable’ Revisited”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Cincinnati Comedian Blake Hammond to Tape Amazon Prime Special at MOTR Pub,” Citybeat.com, 10/26/21
Image by Twitter

More About New Drugs, Strong Arguments

Believe it or not, the response of a TV personality to a TV writer is worthy of an article in the New York Post. Gary Janetti quipped, “This summer on Bravo, The Real Housewives of Ozempic,’ to which Andy Cohen replied, “It’s already airing.” This exchange offered a foundation for unloading information about the popular weight-loss drug, just in case anybody in America has not heard of it yet.

Mayo Clinic endocrinologist Meera Shah had something to say about Ozempic and its siblings, in terms of their side effects. It seems that many people are not that bothered, and others are willing to tolerate the nausea, pain, diarrhea, and constipation. Folklore has it that the uncomfortable results diminish over time, but the cold fact is that “at least 10% of patients who start these drugs have to be taken off of them because the side effects do not improve.”

Dr. Shah specifically mentions the mental anxiety related to not knowing when a bathroom emergency will arise, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. It is very nerve-wracking to never know when pain might hit, or whether it is safe to eat away from home, or if a restroom is readily available. It gets worse. The brain is connected to the gut, and when the brain is in turmoil because of this kind of stress, it tends to make intestinal issues even more pronounced.

There is another medically significant issue: the threat of malnutrition because the appetite is suppressed too much for the person’s own good.

Shah said she commonly has to advise patients to take multivitamins or protein supplements in addition to the medication because they aren’t getting the nutrients they need from food.

Dr. Shah also mentioned to journalist Cara Korte that the job of a diagnosing physician is more difficult when a patient is not forthcoming about previous issues around eating disorders. If a patient admits to a history of disordered eating, she refers them first to another staff member, a behavioral psychologist.

Jens Juul Holst, who helped to develop the GLP-1 drugs, told the press, “[I]t’s unlikely that people will want to stay on the drugs for more than two years.” After a while, it’s a drag to not have an appetite or enjoy eating.

“That may eventually be a problem, that once you’ve been on this for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life,” Holst said. Some of these meds have been available since 2005, and “studies have shown that people don’t stay on them for a long time.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Andy Cohen jokes ‘The Real Housewives of Ozempic’ is airing on Bravo,” NYPost.com, 06/21/23
Source: “Ozempic side effects could lead to hospitalization — and doctors warn that long-term impacts remain unknown,” CBSNews.com, 06/10/23
Source: “Scientist Who Pioneered Drugs Like Ozempic Says They Make Life ‘So Miserably Boring’ After Two Years of Use,” People.com, 06/15/23
Image by Lance Fisher/CC BY-SA 2.0

New Drugs, Strong Arguments, Continued Again

In regard to the suitability of the new wave of weight-loss drugs for teens, one cogent point is that their bodies are still morphing into a mature form, and permanent damage might occur that is even more destructive than carrying extra weight. In addition, it will take a long time and a considerable number of studies to determine whether serious physical damage happens.

How much can semaglutide or tirzepatide contribute to rewiring the brain in a direction that is not healthy? Because once that happens, undoing the damage takes real work. And as always when dealing with adolescents, the specter of eating disorders lurks just offstage. Compared to adults, kids have less freedom of choice in changing their lifestyles. They are subject to oppressive forces, like peer pressure and relentless advertising, to chow down on junk food and chug sugar-sweetened beverages.

They may also be under the parental thumb to an unhealthy extent, and sadly, not all parents make the best decisions on their children’s behalf. And adolescents are already prone to making decisions based on emotion rather than reason, so with a daily or weekly dose of something that might affect their brains, unexpected consequences could ensue.

What could go wrong?

In May, naturopathic physician Christina Kovalik published “Understanding the Hype about Peptide Therapy for Weight Loss.” About GLP-1 peptides like tirsepatide and semaglutide she wrote,

Peptides are smaller versions of proteins, about 50 amino acids or less in size, that signal the body to perform various functions related to gut health, cognition, injury healing, metabolism, inflammation reduction, muscle building and cell recovery.

The injections delay digestion, slow intestinal motility, reduce the production of sugar in the liver, and stimulate the pancreas to secrete insulin. The annoying side effects can include diarrhea, constipation, nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, acid reflux, and fatigue. The more serious, call-your-doctor side effects include allergic reactions, vision changes, dehydration, gallbladder problems, heart palpitations, pancreatitis, kidney damage, and even thyroid cancer. Dr. Kovalik wrote,

It takes time and requires patience. It is a tool that allows you to jump start your metabolism while making lifelong, sustainable changes to the way you eat and the way you move your body. If you choose to go back to your old habits after finishing the program, expect the weight to come back.

Everything Dr. Kovalik says is based on the premise that patients will use these substances for a while, then quit. According to other sources, it looks like there will be no “finishing the program,” because patients who quit will gain the weight right back.

All the voices

But these drugs might be bad for them. But obesity, serious medical problems, and early death are also bad for them. But these drugs have to be injected, and we don’t want our kids learning to use needles. But if they get diabetes, they will be sticking themselves with needles anyway. But the pharmaceutical companies are one step ahead, trying hard (and reportedly with some success) to develop an oral alternative.

But what could happen if we let them have these drugs? (Which is probably a foregone conclusion anyway.) But if we don’t, what horrors of illness and mortality will befall us?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Understanding the Hype about Peptide Therapy for Weight Loss,” FlagstaffBusinessNews.com, 05/31/23
Image by Franklin Park Library/CC BY 2.0

New Drugs, Strong Arguments (Continued)

There are arguments against GLP-1 agonists, the seemingly miraculous drugs that have garnered so much publicity lately. There is trepidation about the effect of these substances on healthy, lean tissue, especially in younger people, whose baseline body composition might be seriously compromised.

But some of those fears have been, if not laid to rest, at least alleviated. After a 72-week trial, an impressive study presented its analysis:

[T]irzepatide once weekly provided substantial reductions in body weight, consistent across all BMI categories, with improvement in body composition that was clinically meaningful and consistent across age groups… Fat mass was reduced 33-36% and lean mass 10-11% depending upon age group. Thus, only one-quarter of the weight lost was lean mass…

Then, up comes a piece in The Atlantic, titled “Ozempic in Teens Is a Mess.”  Either the writer Yasmin Tayag or perhaps an editor contributed the line, “The drug could reroute the trajectory of a kid’s life — or throw it off course.” Which are two different ways to say the same thing: there will be change. The author mentions that American teens (12- to 19-year-olds) are currently in the situation of 22% of them being obese.

We have heard the saying, “A blessing in disguise.” And here is a curse in disguise: There are indications that for adolescents, semaglutide doesn’t simply work — it might even work better for that demographic than for adults. Does anyone seriously think these drugs can be kept away from teens? It really looks like a matter of not “if,” but “when.”

Reroute, or throw off?

This is going to happen, and like just about anything else in life, it will affect some kids in one way and some in another way. The pubescent body has one job, to grow and develop. It can all too easily become the boss, and demand too much food for its own good. At the same time and just to make things more difficult, the brain (and genes) enforce the ancient, locked-in, hard-wired instruction manual that tells the body to hoard every bit of fat it can, as protection against rough times ahead.

The other thing about adolescents is, their brains are not fully formed either, and they can get some peculiar ideas. Also in the medical profession, worriers worry, among other things, about the loss of perfectly good muscle. There really are not many studies, and certainly no long-term studies, of the effect of these weight-loss drugs on young people.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Tirzepatide improves body composition across a range of adult age groups, study shows,” News-medical.net, 05/19/23
Source: “Ozempic in Teens Is a Mess,” TheAtlantic.com, 05/25/23
Image by Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash

New Drugs, Strong Arguments

One of the fastest-moving news stories of the past months has been explosive growth in the release of, and the voracious market for, weight-loss medications based on semaglutide and other GLP-1 agonists.

Early in 2021, the “game-changer” chatter had already started, after The New England Journal of Medicine published news of semaglutide as an anti-obesity pharmaceutical. Phrases like “new era” and “huge potential” were being thrown around, and turned out to be quite prophetic.

Also prophetic: “Semaglutide is likely to be expensive,” as journalist Gina Kolata noted in The New York Times. (The injection “pens,” whether multiple-use or single-use, surely represent a significant proportion of the production cost.) And even then, cautious voices were saying things like,

A high-dose regimen of the drug has not been studied long enough to know if it has serious long-term consequences. And it is expected that patients would have to take it for a lifetime to prevent the weight loss from coming back.

In the spring of this year, some experts curbed their enthusiasm with phrases like “efficacy… within confined parameters,” “downside that some overweight individuals may not be inclined to acknowledge,” and “significant health hazards, such as pancreatitis and thyroid cancer.” Since then, both ecstatic endorsements and dire predictions just keep piling up.

At the top of the worry list for some is the prospect of children getting daily or weekly injections, while others hold that, in the name of preventing childhood obesity, “anything is justifiable.” By “anything,” they presumably mean acquainting and providing minors with injectable drugs which, face it, will happen anyway if the kids get type 2 diabetes.

A piece by Judith Wood was subtitled, “We should do the humane thing for our children, rather than question the ethics of weight-loss injections.” Having grabbed the audience’s attention — “What? Abandon ethics?” — the journalist justified the extreme stand by noting that the obesity crisis is “no longer looming, it has entered that state where it has well and truly arrived.”

And the United Kingdom may have reached the point where its citizens must face unpalatable facts and consider doing even “the unthinkable.” One argument is that due to the yearly cost of obesity-related illnesses, the United Kingdom is bound to run out of money:

Two in three adults in the UK are overweight or obese; if they weren’t, the NHS could save almost £14 billion… Maybe we can’t save those struggling with the effects of excess weight. But we can sure as hell try and save the next generation.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “‘A Game Changer’: Drug Brings Weight Loss in Patients With Obesity,” NYTimes.com, 02/10/21
Source: “Mounjaro Weight Loss,” Benzinga.com, 05/06/23
Source: “David Heathcote: Childhood obesity. Is there a better solution than injecting our children?,” ConservativeHome.com, 05/12/23
Source: “Anything is justifiable to avoid childhood obesity in Britain,” Telegraph.co.uk, 05/19/23
Image by Rob Lee/CC BY-ND 2.0

More on the Consensus Building Event

As promised, here is additional information about the virtual event called “Consensus Building Workshops on addiction-like symptoms related to consumption of certain foods,” which will take place in August and which still seeks more voices.

Dr. Pretlow will, of course, be participating, which is only to be expected since the group exploration is rooted in the publication titled “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” which was authored by Robert Pretlow and Suzette Glasner.

The Facilitation Team is a small group associated with the United Kingdom’s Public Health Collaboration, consisting of Dr. Jen Unwin, Heidi Giaever, Molly Painschab, and Clarissa Kennedy. Its members are interested in convincing the World Health Organization to officially classify food addiction as a disease.

They are reaching out to other experts in eating disorders, addiction, psychology, psychiatry, obesity, metabolic disorders, behavior, nutrition, neuroscience, and more, to help formulate both answers and questions. The overarching objective is to reach a consensus regarding the addiction-like symptoms related to certain foods. According to this statement, the event’s intention is as follows:

Our commitment is to facilitate the discussions and collate and share the outcomes of what we hope will be a set of consensus statements, and “agreements to disagree” where appropriate, for as many groups as we can manage to facilitate.

Our intention, if possible, is to find 30 international expert academics, clinicians and researchers, who are prepared to work with us to this end. If you have contacts or colleagues who you believe may not yet have been invited and who should be part of this, please advise us accordingly.

What happens if addiction-like symptoms are ignored?

Since everybody has to eat, what do we do about the impossibility of moderation therapy, especially if food is by definition psychoactive in nature?

If food addiction is a “thing,” what general category would it fit into?

In terms of professional, academic, and public reaction, how controversial would it be to deem FA as an official disease?

If food addiction exists, how is it different from other eating disorders?

And how is it like other substance abuse disorders, and like other survival-related behavior behavior disorders like “sex addiction”?

Is food addiction even the appropriate name, or would eating addiction be more useful and accurate?

Would it be even more honest to call the whole thing stress relief addiction?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Springer.com, 06/22/22
Image by U.S. Dept. of Education/CC BY 2.0

Dr. Pretlow to Participate in Significant Upcoming Event

An interesting virtual get-together and meeting of minds will take place in August, and Dr. Pretlow will be a participant (more on that later). This is not surprising, because the basic ideas are derived from the document “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” authored by Robert Pretlow & Suzette Glasner.

There is a great deal of interest in developing ways to diminish the cues that lead to overeating: the pervasive intrusion of advertising; the ubiquitous presence of fast-food outlets; the holidays on which people feel compelled to eat for social approval; and other insidious factors.

But getting rid of cues, triggers and temptations can only go so far. There is a number of reasons, some of them having to do with American freedoms. After a certain point, people begin to push back, muttering such phrases as “nanny state” and “government overreach.” But the aversion is not only to political involvement.

Basic human nature prompts children to start saying “No!” at an astonishingly early age. As kids grow, they can develop unrelenting stubbornness when being told what is good for them by parents, teachers, partners, or even healthcare professionals. The resistance trait often carries into adulthood. It tags along, as part of the familiar and unexamined luggage we drag through the years and sometimes need to be reminded about, so we can take it to the landfill and dump it in a hole.

The interesting part

There are people on whom cues and triggers do not work. They can look a bag of chips or a chicken wing straight in the eye and be unmoved. What is it about such people? What is their secret? Where does this superhuman ability come from?

If we consider the proposition that the true culprit is stress, the outlook becomes more hopeful, because that can be handled to some extent. If a person isn’t stressed out, cues and triggers have less opportunity to sink their teeth in. Apparently, some folks are simply not constitutionally predisposed to crumbling under stress. As with so many other human problems, there could be a genetic element.

It is also possible that these fortunate individuals have successfully and non-violently removed one or more sources of stress from their lives — and if so, this is also worth looking into. Maybe some folks have learned to cope with stress by cultivating proactive, creative and effective ways to burn off nervous energy. They don’t get overwhelmed and eat themselves into oblivion, because they have developed toolkits. A person can learn a skillset, which is what BrainWeighve is all about.

What to look forward to

The August event, “Consensus Building Workshops on addiction-like symptoms related to consumption of certain foods,” is the creation of four colleagues whose ambitious goal is to persuade the World Health Organization “to include symptoms of addiction related to food, as a disease, in the International Classification of Disease, ICD-11.”

It will consist of a number of online workshops on the subject of food addiction as a disease.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Springer.com, 06/22/22

Obesity and Telehealth, Continued

The previous post left off by describing a study of weight loss technology, as applied to young adults. The kids who participated were asked what kinds of information they did not have enough of. Among many other things, they expressed a need for help in defining reasonable goals. They were not averse to hearing experts give advice about how to overcome barriers (internal and external) and get results.

They talked about what they would want from a weight-management app: an individualized program tailored to their “height, weight, gender, age, and weight loss goals.” And again, as researcher Janna Stephens noted…

Very few young adults knew that any of these features were available in current smartphone applications and when they heard that it was available, they were excited to use this type of technology.

What kind of personal feedback would kids want from their ideal telehealth program? The “how” was easy — text message or email. A weekly summary of the objective facts would be fine: records of their food consumption, physical activity, and measurable progress. What they did not want was negative feedback of any kind. Apparently, most teens get enough of that at home and school.

Short time, big change

Five years later, the telehealth field exploded. It was forced to, by the worldwide COVID-19 emergency. A large number of pediatric nurses collaborated on a paper to explain how things were going. It mentioned the lack of income that massive societal disruption imposed on many families, and the consequent dearth of health insurance for them. Long-distance doctoring became essential, and many primary care providers adopted telemedicine as an integral part of their practices.

Two years later the American Academy of Pediatrics held its national conference, where telemedicine was gratefully credited for its contributions to the management of pediatric obesity during the pandemic. Journalist Celeste Krewson gave an example:

[C]are at the WELL clinic shifted to telemedicine delivery… The telemedicine program during the COVID-19 pandemic involved 20-minute sessions based on the Wheel of Health, a health management chart including social and emotional wellness, sleep, screen time, physical activity, and nutrition.

Primary care pediatricians refer patients to WELL, where they meet with a specially trained board-certified pediatrician or nurse practitioner. They are then given counseling for obesity and any comorbidities. Patients receive support in scheduling, follow-up, and care coordination.

Overall, the results showed that telemedicine is “clinically and financially feasible for obesity intervention in pediatric patients,” and “could give children access to a high-quality program no matter what background they come from.”

Today

This post would be incomplete without a reminder to check out the very comprehensive, effective, state-of-the-art telehealth program, BrainWeighve.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “When Pandemics Collide: The Impact of COVID-19 on Childhood Obesity,” PediatricNursing.org, 11/11/20
Source: “Telemedicine intervention effective against childhood obesity,” ContemporaryPediatrics.com, 10/11/22
Image by Esther Vargas/CC BY-SA 2.0

Obesity and Telehealth

The term telehealth covers a lot of ground. It has to do with using electronic technologies to disperse needed information and support vital communication, especially between medical personnel and patients, and includes the ability to ask for and receive advice. People can absorb helpful information and then ask the professionals about the need for and availability of intervention. The technology is particularly brilliant at monitoring everything from a patient’s vital signs to their food intake.

A lot of people cannot walk, and many more do not drive, which is also acutely limiting. A lot of people should not go out because of compromised immunity, or they live too far from the nearest medical center to make a journey practical or possible. Thanks to technology, a medic can not only ask for a description of the symptoms but look at the rash or the swollen throat from afar. All of that is in the specific area of telemedicine, a term that leans toward more direct care.

Expansive telehealth

The larger category of telehealth can include distance learning for professionals, data management, presentations, staff meetings, supervisory sessions, and other functions the patient is not directly connected to.

In the summer of 2012, Janna Stephens, who went on to become a very large presence in the field, wrote this about a certain age group:

[T]he intervention needs to be something that will stimulate them and something they want to do. Adolescents spend hours on their smartphones and use applications to do just about everything. So why not weight loss?

In 2014, Stephens and two co-authors published “Technology-Assisted Weight Management Interventions: Systematic Review of Clinical Trials.” After examining nearly 40 appropriate studies, they concluded that overweight and obese adults could certainly benefit from behavioral interventions assisted by technology. But sadly, out of even such a small number of studies, only a few used mobile devices and…

[…] none was able to identify which features were most responsible for changes in outcomes, and few reported long-term outcomes.

In the following year, Stephens published “Smartphone Technology to Decrease BMI in Overweight and Obese Adolescents.” The object was to arouse interest in studying the use of a smartphone app to help high school students lose weight. She described the application’s purpose as “self-monitoring of dietary habits and physical activity… combined with a one time behavioral counseling session.” She also specified that the philosophical basis for the study was Social Cognitive Theory, “which focuses on strategies to increase self-efficacy for healthy behaviors.”

In the same year Janna Stephens RN, BSN, Ph.D., was also one of three co-authors of “Young Adults, Technology, and Weight Loss: A Focus Group Study.” The researchers sought out the opinions of young adults about obesity, weight-loss counseling, and smartphone technology, and discovered (and remember, this was back in 2015):

Although young adults do not know about specific technology that exists, they are open to learning this technology as long as it fits into their lifestyle.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Technology Can Trim Childhood Obesity,” Newswise.com, 08/09/12
Source: “Technology-Assisted Weight Management Interventions: Systematic Review of Clinical Trials,” LiebertPub.com, 12/22/14
Source: “Smartphone Technology to Decrease BMI in Overweight and Obese Adolescents,” Grantome.com, 01/01/15
Source: “Young Adults, Technology, and Weight Loss: A Focus Group Study,” Nih.gov, 02/18/15
Image by EpicTopTen.com/CC BY 2.0

A Decade of Tech, Part 14

Sitting around all the time is a sure recipe for obesity. Everybody knows that. But what if it’s the other way around? What if being obese is the cause of too much sitting around? Someone wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery, and used information gleaned from 3,864 mother-offspring pairs to help figure out what is really going on. The project required technology of course, so monitoring devices would play a very important role.

An article published in 2020 explains the background. First of all…

[…] it is important to understand whether early-life obesity drives sedentary behavior in adulthood, as this further highlights the importance of controlling childhood obesity for preventing poor behaviors that are likely to impact health outcomes in later life.

The researchers wondered if a basic tenet of causality has been too easily accepted. It seemed important to establish that weight causes immobility, as much as immobility causes weight. In fact, it looked to them as if “the association more strongly operates in the direction from obesity to sedentary behavior/moderate-vigorous intensity physical activity (MVPA) rather than inactivity causing obesity.”

In other words, obesity leads sometimes to sloth, except for the times when it leads to moderate and even intense activity (and in some cases, TV contracts). At the same time, no one denies that sedentary behavior can and does contribute to obesity. So, there is a lot going on here.

Stage one

The first round of information was lifted from the 1970 British Cohort Study when, at ages 31 and 10, respectively, the height and weight of each mother-offspring pair had been recorded, along with other information. In 2016 the researchers returned to take a second look, when the younger generation of subjects had reached the age of 46 or 47.

Information was collected by a motion-detecting device called activPAL fastened around each participant’s thigh to report on the person’s level of activity. The activPAL device had started being used in 2001, so it was well-established by that time. The accuracy of the information was undoubtedly higher than in the first round, when activity levels had been determined by self-reporting. According to the study results,

Intergenerational data on mother-offspring pairs were utilized in an instrumental variable analysis to examine the longitudinal association between BMI and sedentary behavior.

A causal pathway was found, leading from high BMI in early life to greater device-measured sitting behavior in adulthood. The study authors concluded that “There is strong evidence for a causal pathway linking childhood obesity to greater sedentary behavior.”

The report said that the study “aimed to assess causal associations between obesity in childhood and sitting behavior in middle age,” which has an unintentional ring of satire. It also refers to a number of observational studies “that have suggested adiposity to be a stronger predictor of future sedentary behavior and lower MVPA rather than the reverse (i.e., activity predicting obesity).”

Pinning down this relationship is said to be vital because, if we can keep kids from getting obese, they won’t sit around so much in later life. According to the study authors,

Our findings suggest that obesity in early life may be causally related to adverse sitting and physical activity behaviors in adulthood, potentially further amplifying the risks of obesity and other cardiometabolic conditions. Policies to promote physical activity should focus on preventing childhood obesity and weight gain.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Childhood Obesity and Device-Measured Sedentary Behavior: An Instrumental Variable Analysis of 3,864 Mother–Offspring Pairs,” Wiley.com, 11/01/20
Image by Katy Warner/CC BY-SA 2.0

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Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Obesity top bottom

The Book

OVERWEIGHT: What Kids Say explores the obesity problem from the often-overlooked perspective of children struggling with being overweight.

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Dr. Robert A. Pretlow is a pediatrician and childhood obesity specialist. He has been researching and spreading awareness on the childhood obesity epidemic in the US for more than a decade.
You can contact Dr. Pretlow at:

Presentations

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the American Society of Animal Science 2020 Conference
What’s Causing Obesity in Companion Animals and What Can We Do About It

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the World Obesity Federation 2019 Conference:
Food/Eating Addiction and the Displacement Mechanism

Dr. Pretlow’s Multi-Center Clinical Trial Kick-off Speech 2018:
Obesity: Tackling the Root Cause

Dr. Pretlow’s 2017 Workshop on
Treatment of Obesity Using the Addiction Model

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation for
TEC and UNC 2016

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the 2015 Obesity Summit in London, UK.

Dr. Pretlow’s invited keynote at the 2014 European Childhood Obesity Group Congress in Salzburg, Austria.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2013 European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool, UK.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2011 International Conference on Childhood Obesity in Lisbon, Portugal.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2010 Uniting Against Childhood Obesity Conference in Houston, TX.

Food & Health Resources