Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Addiction and Hard Questions

Pat Hartman March 2, 2022 No Comments

We broke off in the middle of considering an article by H. Ziauddeen and P. C. Fletcher of the University of Cambridge. They were talking about the concept of food addiction, in relation to the “useful indicators of substance dependence.” The building up of tolerance is a famous indicator, with its constant need to increase the amount of substance to achieve the desired effect.

Withdrawal is another term that needs careful consideration. One psychological factor that comes into play is the “expenditure of effort to acquire the addictive substance.” Is stealing a candy bar the same as killing someone for heroin? Is stealing meat less culpable than stealing cupcakes? Is food abuse the same as food dependence? And doesn’t that phrase sound slightly absurd? After all, 100% of humans are food-dependent.

But then, we get back on more solid ground as the authors say,

Substance abuse is characterized by recurrent use of the substance with one or more of the following features: failure to fulfil role obligations, use in harmful situations, consequent legal problems and persistent use despite negative consequences.

Morbidly obese people do put themselves in harmful situations, like, for instance, the risk of losing a job or insurance because of uncontrollable eating. They face social disapproval every time they board an airplane. They lie to loved ones and do crazy things. Here is an anonymous quotation:

I buy a package of ice cream, then eat it all. Then I have to go to the store to buy it again. For a week my family thinks there’s a thing of ice cream in the fridge — but it’s actually five different ones.

Food addiction theory was considered by the Cambridge authors, at that time, as a “rough and incomplete descriptive phenomenon that is unsupported by existing evidence.” They doubted that substance addiction was the best framework for discussing food addiction, and added that if food addiction is to have any clinical value,

[…] it must add something to the treatment of sufferers either in terms of developing/selecting the appropriate psychological therapy or the right pharmacological treatment.

Around the same time, a four-author paper was published that indicated parallels between drug addiction and obesity. Drawing their conclusions from brain imaging studies, they wrote of how both drugs and food come with built-in reinforcing tools. Dopamine squirts out and the brain likes it, and ignores other parts of itself that try to let reason prevail.

Being hooked on food or drugs can both be called…

[…] disorders in which the saliency of a specific type of reward (food or drug) becomes exaggerated relative to, and at the expense of others rewards… The combined results suggest that both obese and drug-addicted individuals suffer from impairments in dopaminergic pathways that regulate neuronal systems associated not only with reward sensitivity and incentive motivation, but also with conditioning, self-control, stress reactivity and interoceptive awareness.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?,” Wiley.com, 10/12/12
Source: “Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong,” HuffingtonPost.com, 09/19/18
Source: “Obesity and addiction: neurobiological overlaps,” Wiley.com, 09/27/12
Image by Alexander Henning Drachmann/CC BY-SA 2.0

Branches of the Question Tree

Pat Hartman March 1, 2022 No Comments

Is there such a thing as food addiction? Is it a substance addiction or a behavioral addiction, or a combination of the two? Or something else entirely? Could a situation be going on that no one has thought of yet? There must be more to this issue than meets the eye, because it has been discussed for years.

A long article published a decade back posed the question in its title: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?” H. Ziauddeen and P. C. Fletcher “explored the theoretical and empirical foundations” of the idea, and the evidence for the addiction model that exists in the realms of neuroscience, and of behavioral and clinical data. The food addiction notion wields “remarkable, and, in our view, unjustified, influence” and “has acquired much currency with relatively little supporting evidence.”

They come down on the side of doubting whether the addiction model is necessary for understanding excessive weight; convinced that it is “unlikely to be a causal pathway in the majority of people with obesity.”

The doubters express three major objections. First, substance addiction is expected to have a clearly identifiable addictive agent, the juice that provably affects the brain. As the authors put it,

[If] we intend to examine the model and its neurobehavioural components, it would be important to categorize precisely what this critical addictive element is.

The equation also involves a presupposition that lab animals react the same as people, which is always open to some degree of doubt. Sure, there have been plenty of experiments with rodents and sugar and other substances. But when it comes to humans and food addiction, the best that its proponents can come up with, as the guilty substance, is “highly processed foods.”

It’s complicated. No one denies that certain classes of foods are deleterious to cardiovascular and metabolic health. But this does not meet the definition of an addictive substance. The issue also has another dimension. Not every heavy drug user becomes addicted. Does anyone even know the “why” of that, yet?

Point being, hyper-palatable foods are everywhere, so now we have to figure out why some people get addicted to them and others do not. According to the researchers,

Food, unlike drugs, is consumed ubiquitously and does not have a simple direct pharmacological action. Therefore, its use and misuse cannot easily be quantified, nor can one identify features of its consumption that indicate a clear transition from use to abuse/addiction…

On the third hand, a decade ago it was not quite so glaringly apparent that really, an enormous number of people become addicted to highly processed foods.

The authors, both of the University of Cambridge, do not say this in so many words, but there seems to be an undercurrent of a suggestion that some people prefer the addiction model, because addiction is an illness, not a crime, and they don’t want to feel guilty or responsible for their own inability to stop eating so much.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?,” Wiley.com, 10/12/12
Image by David Abercrombie/CC BY-SA 2.0

Still Hooked

Pat Hartman February 28, 2022 No Comments

It has been a while since addiction was discussed here, so the object of the next few posts is to catch up with ideas that people have had about the subject, over recent years, in connection with food.

It has been said that “addiction is physical compulsion plus mental obsession plus denial.” The source of that quotation has been removed from the internet, but it sounds fair enough. Physical compulsion alone may not be enough to successfully maintain an addiction. After the Vietnam War, many American troops who had been heavy users of heroin overseas were reportedly able to drop the habit with relative ease, once they were back in the USA.

Another relevant quotation is from renowned writer Anne Lamott:

Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: “This s— has got to stop.”

The moment of bottoming out also sometimes happens to people in their relationship with food. They pull themselves together and make it through a tough program of body modification, maybe even with surgery and all that involves, and then come face to face with… the rest of their life.

A person who needs to maintain the weight loss is very much like a recovering alcoholic. This is true especially for patients who have achieved their initial weight loss via bariatric surgery. They dare not make a misstep, because if their remaining fraction of a stomach gets stretched, suddenly they are heading down a very slippery slope. They have to be super attentive to the levels of every single substance in their blood, because soaking up enough nutrients is quite a chore for a body that retains only a fraction of a stomach.

It really is a journey

In other words, weight maintenance is like sobriety maintenance, a thing to be done for the rest of their lives, one day at a time, forever. Does that sound grim? Actually, it does. The strictness of the lifestyle is daunting. One thing is certain — for every person who succeeds in maintenance, dozens fail. In fact, there are probably many more recovering alcoholics with five years in than people who have shed a lot of weight and kept it off for the same length of time. This could be seen as evidence that food addiction is even worse than alcohol addiction, and there is near-universal agreement that alcoholism is very bad indeed.

Sprinkled back through time are mentions of the concepts of addictive foods, food addiction, eating addiction, and other related topics. In 2006, a group called FARE, or Food Addiction Research Education was formed and organized the first Food Addiction Summit. Their Q&A page provides a dozen questions and answers. One thing they urge people to do is, get over the idea that sugar is a food, because it isn’t — it’s a drug. And flour is just as bad! They are really and seriously negative toward anything with gluten in it.

Sweeteners, grains and dairy show the greatest potential for addiction. The more refined or processed a food is, the more habit-forming it can become. As with any addictive substance, increased amounts are needed over time to satisfy cravings and avoid symptoms of withdrawal.

On the causative side it is, like most of life’s difficulties, a multi-factorial thing. The page lists 10 different physical and psychological and emotional conditions that can, alone or in combination, push a person into food addiction. On the question of withdrawal, it is real.

Cravings create an urge for more serotonin or dopamine, which only temporarily relieve the discomfort of withdrawal symptoms. As we have mentioned, this is a vicious cycle. And it can lead to life-threatening conditions, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. As with any other drug, the former user may experience grief, depression, excitability, social withdrawal, and anxiety, and the misery can last for months.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Small Victories,” aAamboli.com, undated
Source: “What is food addiction?,” foodAddictionResearch.org, undated
Image by franchise opportunities/CC BY-SA 2.0

System-Roaming Symptoms Find a Voice

Pat Hartman February 25, 2022 No Comments

Yesterday we quoted Nick Whigham, who made special mention of how annoying long COVID’s “teasing” nature is to its victims. A system-roaming condition turns up where and when it pleases. It doesn’t care if shortness of breath has been your main problem up until now. It arbitrarily decides, instead, to torment your sleep attempts with itchy hands. Long COVID is a tedious game of whack-a mole, with new pains and weaknesses relentlessly turning up and needing to be dealt with.

Much knowledge has been gained from patient groups forming within social media platforms, or by the request of medical staff members at various institutions. One is the Body Politic COVID-19 Support Group, whose newsletter is open to all.

Leora Horwitz, who directs NYU’s Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science, sees a role for the immune system in the overall picture. Journalist Yasmin Tayag paraphrased and quoted Horwitz:

The sheer range of symptoms reported by people with long Covid — more than 200 across 10 groups of organ systems, according to one patient-led survey — makes uncovering their biological origins a gargantuan task. There are likely several subtypes of long Covid, each with its own cluster of symptoms and cause. “We’re not talking about a monolithic, single entity.”

As previously mentioned, long COVID is similar but not identical to other conditions, including ME/CFS, otherwise known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Black women are particularly susceptible to this ailment, and have long fought for recognition of their peculiar vulnerability to it. Writer Jamie Ducharme explains:

Researchers now believe at least 10% of COVID-19 patients develop long-term symptoms, including some that sound identical to those associated with ME/CFS: constant fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, chronic pain, gastrointestinal distress and more, many of which worsen after exertion. Some researchers now believe the conditions are one and the same, and some Long COVID patients who have been sick at least six months meet diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS.

People who had long been assailed by ME/CFS reached out to long COVID victims to share their hard-won knowledge of how to cope, especially in one important area. These patients are often misadvised by medical personnel, and urged to “push through” their exhaustion and force themselves to exercise. But persistence is not the answer here, or at least not the only answer. It is not the same type of recovery as strengthening a post-operative knee. When these patients give it the old college try, they too often wind up on an emergency room visit that could and should have been avoided.

Another recommended resource is Survivor Corps, which has published useful research. Families might also want to take a look at the Long Covid Kids Support Group, another community exemplifying the self-help and mutual-help movements that have spontaneously sprung up to meet the ever-increasing need.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “’Dying not only worry’: Coronavirus ‘long-hauler’ details horrific symptoms,” Yahoo.com, 08/02/20
Source: “What causes long Covid? Scientists are zeroing in on the answer,” Vox.com, 01/31/22
Source: “Black Women Are Fighting to Be Recognized as Long COVID Patients,” TIME.com, 04/12/21
Image by Mike Towber/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Suspicions Arose, Then Voices

Pat Hartman February 24, 2022 No Comments

We are looking at the journey to recognition, the road along which long COVID traveled to become acknowledged as a real and worrisome condition, leading eventually to the awful realization that it can also affect teens and even children.

The first big step was accepting that the lungs are not the only target. It became more and more apparent that the virus is all up in every organ system, and capable of sending its bad news to every nook and cranny of the body, including tiny blood vessels in the toes. First, suspicions arose, then voices. The voices demanded that the medical and government establishments needed to stop using “mild” as a word to describe all non-hospitalized cases.

Writing for The Atlantic, Ed Yong put it like this:

They should agree on a definition of recovery that goes beyond being discharged from the hospital or testing negative for the virus, and accounts for a patient’s quality of life.

In her epic article for the same magazine, referenced by Childhood Obesity News in an earlier post, Meghan O’Rourke stood up for patients who felt ignored or dismissed. Most doctors depended solely on lab tests, a collection of measurements totally inadequate to do the job of figuring out what was going on. She reported on a group called Patient-Led Research for COVID-19, made up of nearly 4,000 long COVID sufferers, plus medical professionals who listened to them, and collected and organized their information.

Astonishingly, months after they were expected and alleged to be all better, almost all the patients still experienced incidents of relapse. Nearly a quarter of them were unable to return to work yet. O’Rourke wrote,

One of the disease’s great mysteries is why some 30-year-olds die from it while others barely notice they have it, and still others initially have a mild acute case but end up unable to manage a flight of stairs. This pandemic has vividly dramatized the variability — and lingering complexity — of the human host’s response to a pathogen.

She outlined the broad hypothesis: that in some patients, “either the virus or the immune system’s reaction to it had caused dramatic dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system.” The problem looked a lot like myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), characterized by exercise intolerance and profound fatigue. Still, it wasn’t exactly the same, or the same as autoimmune conditions, either. But here’s the thing:

These are all poorly understood conditions that, evidence suggests, can be triggered by the body’s response to infections, with clusters of system-roaming symptoms that get grouped under one name.

Writer Nick Whigham noted the growing social media presence of coronavirus long-haul patients on Facebook. As often happens, presence became pressure, especially when people sounded off about the obstacles between them and effective medical attention.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19,” TheAtlantic.com, 08/19/20
Source: “Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID,” TheAtlantic.com, 03/08/21
Source: “’Dying not only worry’: Coronavirus ‘long-hauler’ details horrific symptoms,” Yahoo.com, 08/02/20
Image by Eva Rinaldi/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Suspicions Arise

Pat Hartman February 23, 2022 No Comments

We are looking at how the consciousness of the serious nature of long COVID originated and then progressed over the ensuing months. In mid-2020, Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute contributed some words about the early understanding of the problem. It was becoming clear that being “asymptomatic” did not guarantee an absence of damage from the virus. Dr. Topol wrote,

If you do a CAT scan of these patients’ lungs, you see significant abnormalities tied to Covid, and these are woefully understudied. We also know this the virus can go to the heart and kidneys, so that needs to be looked at too.

He warned of the possibility that “below-the-surface problems” could increase a coronavirus victim’s risk for long-term health complications. At the same time, from Israel, Nathan Jeffay reported on people who tested positive and yet had no symptoms — and their opposites, those who tested negative, or who had ostensibly “recovered,” but who still experienced massively disturbing symptoms.

Prof. Gabriel Izbicki of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center shared with the Times of Israel reporter that “More than half the patients, weeks after testing negative, are still symptomatic.” Some were unable to sleep. Doctors were puzzled by the appearance of symptoms in arms, legs, and other places where the virus was presumed not to have a direct impact. Patients had “freak pains,” and some reported their pain level as 10 on a 1-to-10 scale.

Exhausted by life

They were unable to walk more than a few steps, or too lethargic to find the motivation to do anything but exist. They had breathing problems, unconquerable weakness, and extreme weight loss (not the flattering, fashionable kind). Patients who had allegedly been “recovered” for months kept coming back with unusual patterns of symptoms that could not be found in the textbooks.

Dr. Izbicki was puzzled by his inability to predict which patients were able to shake off the disease, as opposed to those who would still be suffering months later. He told the reporter, “There is no correlation between seriousness of disease during hospitalization and extent of symptoms afterwards.”

Suspicion began to grow that COVID-19 was not just a lung condition but quite possibly involved the circulatory system and thus the entire body. Eran Schenker, director of the clinic for recovered COVID patients, told the reporter,

The damage was not done by the virus, but by an inflammation process which, we know from other diseases, will not leave lungs with the capacity to exchange oxygen as before.

Mitchell Tsai, who interprets medical matters for laypeople, described how coronavirus makes the blood “sticky” seven months later, and is prone to clog the tiny vessels that carry oxygenated blood not only to the lungs, but to the heart, brain, and every other organ, as well as to the mundane parts like arms and legs. He also described demyelination, where the immune system attacks the body’s own nerve cells, “causing weakness, numbness, and tingling.” In some cases, demyelination can lead to psychosis and hallucinations.

A team of MSN.com reporters soon described how the virus inflames and damages blood vessels in a way that can negatively affect the brain. They also related how a preliminary study of COVID patients (who were mostly able to avoid hospitalization) nonetheless showed that about a quarter of the subjects still endured at least one symptom after 90 days. A European study of nearly 2,000 non-hospitalized patients revealed that three months after their first symptoms appeared, about one-third of those victims were still dependent on a caregiver for their daily needs.

They also quoted Mount Sinai’s Dr. Zijian Chen, who said,

I haven’t really seen any other illness that affects so many different organ systems in as many different ways as Covid does.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “What You Need to Know About Asymptomatic Spread of Covid-19,” Medium.com, 06/10/20
Source: “‘It’s frightening’: Doctors say half of ‘cured’ COVID patients still suffer,” TimesOfIsrael.com, 06/28/20
Source: “Seven months later, what we know about Covid-19 — and the pressing questions that remain,” Quora.com, 08/19/20
Source: “Doctors Begin to Crack Covid’s Mysterious Long-Term Effects,” MSN.com, 11/01/20
Image by Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Long COVID on the Road to Recognition

Pat Hartman February 22, 2022 No Comments

The point here is, if we thought that merely staying indoors was bad for childhood obesity statistics, it looks like the country needs to prepare for the painful revelation that “We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.” Just wait until all the kids who had COVID-19 and ostensibly got over it begin to show up with long COVID or MISC-C or some other long-term damage that hasn’t even been identified yet. On the darkest days, it is all too easy to foresee an entire generation so debilitated they’re unable to do anything but creep around indoors, remaining inactive and putting on weight.

A lot of people never wanted to believe in long COVID, and many still do not, but the evidence has piled up relentlessly. In yesterday’s post, we referenced an article by Meghan O’Rourke, tracing the history of awareness as it grew among individual doctors and researchers.

When Mount Sinai hospital opened up its Center for Post-COVID Care, endocrinologist Zijian Chen was chosen to be the medical director. He studied the results of a survey of around 1,800 patients who were “more than a month past their initial infection but still experiencing symptoms.” In other words, according to the established criteria, they were officially better. But somehow, their bodies had not received the memo.

One mystifying aspect was, in the acute stage, most of those lingering cases had not been particularly serious. Many of the respondents had not even been hospitalized. They tended to be on the young side, and their demographic had not been rife with pre-existing conditions. They had expected the illness to be an unpleasant but brief chapter of life, and instead it was showing a tendency to become their new normal. Here they were, multitudes of patients who still experienced heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, brain fog, and mainly a debilitating and seemingly intractable fatigue.

Where is it?

Because different body systems were affected, Dr. Chen got together a multi-disciplinary group of specialists to figure out what was going on. But rather than remaining consistent, the patients’ symptoms were all over the shop, sending them from one type of specialist to another. Members of the team ordered reams of lab tests, whose results left them none the wiser.

One thing going on with the supposedly recovered patients was their breathing not normalized. O’Rourke wrote,

Evidence began to accrue that long-COVID patients were breathing shallowly through their mouths and into their upper chest. By contrast, a proper breath happens in the nose and goes deep into the diaphragm; it stimulates the vagus nerve along the way, helping regulate heart rate and the nervous system.

A company was brought on board that “introduced a science-based breathwork program” or, some might say, rebranded a centuries-old system called yoga. O’Rourke’s article points out several important aspects of the long COVID problem. While the needed care is not generally high-tech, it is “time-consuming and attention-intensive.” Clinicians are called upon to give attention to a great deal of nuance and ambiguity, two qualities that modern medicine is not particularly well equipped to deal with.

Today’s doctors are used to a quick, or at least definitive, answer. Find the right medication, or perform the appropriate surgery, and voilà! — problem solved. Few medical professionals are used to dealing with conditions that drag on, with the shapeshifting characteristics of a science fiction movie monster. After interviewing many of the hospital’s specialized team, O’Rourke noted that while most of Mount Sinai’s post-acute COVID patients were headed toward recovery, none of them could report feeling like they did before COVID-19 entered their lives.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID,” TheAtlantic.com, 03/08/21
Image by muffinn (modified)/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Is Long COVID a Thing?

Pat Hartman February 21, 2022 No Comments

Scientists are curious, but there is more to it than just an inquisitive nature. Part of the skill is in knowing what to be curious about. Another part is the ability to sense when a vague anomaly is worth investigating. In the beginning, COVID-19 was believed to have an acute period of two weeks. A year ago, for The Atlantic, Meghan O’Rourke wrote a comprehensive article called “Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID.” It included this definition:

Acute COVID-19 refers to the distinct period of infection during which the immune system fights off the virus; the acute phase can range from mild to severe.

At Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, Zijian Chen, an endocrinologist, had been appointed medical director of the hospital’s new Center for Post-COVID Care. The facility was dedicated both to research and to helping recovering patients “transition from hospital to home.” So Dr. Chen was soaking up information, maybe not expecting to stumble upon anything monumental, just looking at details and piecing odd facts together.

He encountered an online survey whose database included 1,800 patients or thereabouts. It seems as if any number would be impressive, because among the long-haul symptoms are fatigue and brain fog. In those states, it is sometimes difficult to accomplish the most basic maintenance activities, much less journal about the sickness.

Such patients also cope with chest pain, heart palpitations, and shortness of breath, but the after-effects can also be much worse. Dr. Chen was puzzled to find, again and again, references to patients who were more than a month past their initial infection but still experiencing symptoms:

We expect that with viral infections as a whole, with few exceptions, you get better… Many patients were, for unknown reasons, not recovering… [M]ost had had mild cases of COVID-19 — they had neither been hospitalized nor developed pneumonia. Before contracting the virus, many had had no known health issues. Yet they were reporting significant ongoing symptoms.

Chen quickly convened a multidisciplinary group of clinicians to do research in the area of post-COVID care, and since then, knowledge has grown enormously. For instance, Childhood Obesity News has mentioned writer Eleanor Cummins, who has also told the public about the Body Politic COVID-19 support group.

Board Member Hannah Davis, who had the virus along with her children, described this as the place where she had “encountered hundreds of other people describing stranger symptoms and longer recovery times than anyone anticipated.” They need the rest of the world to understand what is going on, because many COVID survivors…

[…] have reported feeling dismissed or gaslit by their doctors for unusual symptoms. They’ve also received skepticism from loved ones, who have dismissed their pain as attention-seeking or the result of an overactive imagination.

Davis knows about such subjects as computational linguistics. Her background is in machine learning and data analysis with a special interest in “tools for countering bias in machine learning datasets.” What Survivor Corps wants to do, is “work directly with a research institution and a biotech company on a long-term study of Covid-19 patients’ outcomes.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID,” TheAtlantic.com, 03/08/21
Source: “Guidelines Say Covid-19 Symptoms Last Two Weeks. Survivors Know Better.,” Medium.com, 05/20/20
Source: “Meet the Team,” WeareBodyPolitic.com, undated
Images by Alastair Gilfillan and hobvias sudoneighm/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles: The Struggle for Recognition

Pat Hartman February 18, 2022 No Comments

The struggle for recognition was not of the virus itself, of course, but of its insidious and invidious long-term effects. Today’s obese adults are yesterday’s obese children. Today’s obese children are tomorrow’s obese adults. And since a couple of years ago, COVID-19 is all mixed up in it somehow. And… it looks like this factor might become much more significant as time goes on.

By now it is obvious that, in the words of Prof. Resia Pretorius, “even mild and sometimes asymptomatic initial Covid-19 infection may lead to debilitating, long-term disability.” The creator of LongCovidKids.org writes,

One of the biggest failures during the Covid-19 pandemic is our slow response in diagnosing and treating long Covid. As many as 100 million people worldwide already suffer from long Covid.

Since early 2020, we and other researchers have pointed out that acute Covid-19 is not only a lung disease, but actually significantly affects the vascular (blood flow) and coagulation (blood clotting) systems.

Among other ongoing yet often-varying symptoms, long COVID victims experience “recurring fatigue and brain fog, muscle weakness, being out of breath and having low oxygen levels, sleep difficulties and anxiety or depression.” People in this condition are not often found on elliptical machines, or shopping for fresh veggies. Often, they are lucky if they can get out of bed and make it to the bathroom.

People are sick at home for a long time, either alone or with others who possibly are not well-trained caregivers. Even with the best intentions about healthful eating, victims of PASC (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2) may not be able to shop for themselves. Some Americans are so really, desperately ill, that managing their diets — or those of their dependent children — would be a hopelessly ambitious project. And kids who feel so lousy are probably not going out for football anytime soon.

This plague is still in its infancy, so how can anyone know what the future holds? There is, however, a strong suspicion in some quarters that the obesity statistics will continue to become even more discouraging.

Not hopeless?

Early in the game, the official word was that recovery after the acute illness took about two weeks. Immediately, dissenting voices were heard. These were not just unhappy, underpaid employees looking for a reason to ditch work. Early in 2020, for instance, journalist Eleanor Cummins wrote about a medical expert, a virologist named Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine — in other words, not some lollygagging layabout. He reported that after recovery from acute coronavirus, it was almost two months before he “started feeling like himself again.”

A few months ago, the Americans With Disabilities Act was extended to protect people suffering from long COVID. This directly impacts obesity, because suffering from PASC is probably a good indication that a person is not in peak form, and possibly doesn’t even have the energy or the will to weigh their food portions at mealtime. To make matters worse, recovery is rarely an orderly, linear progression. The person tends to improve for a short time, or in one respect, but then fall prey to an unpredicted relapse. But now, possibly, more parents and children will be able to get better.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Could microclots help explain the mystery of long Covid?,” TheGuardian.com, 01/05/22
Source: “Guidelines Say Covid-19 Symptoms Last Two Weeks. Survivors Know Better.,” Medium.com, 05/20/20
Source: “Biden Extends Americans With Disabilities Act Protections To COVID Long-Haulers,” HASC.org, 07/26/21
Images by Timothy Fenn and Nathan/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Are Excuses Being Made?

Pat Hartman February 17, 2022 No Comments

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on a study of COVID-19 patients between the ages of 12 and 17, and guess what? About two-thirds of those patients were obese.

Of all underlying conditions, obesity was found to be the most common. Also, children with underlying conditions — including obesity — are more likely to wind up in the Intensive Care Unit. As if that were not enough, obese kids tend to stay hospitalized for about twice as long as those who are not obese.

Just to put the icing on the cake, “hospitalization rates were 10 times higher for unvaccinated adolescents.” Is there some reason why obese teenagers are less likely to be vaccinated than others? This whole relationship between obesity and COVID is just a tangled can of worms, and if somebody doesn’t get a handle on it, children and teens with weight issues will continue to be prime victims.

Not exactly news

Readers of Childhood Obesity News have absorbed plenty of information on the close relationship between the two epidemics. For NationalReview.com, journalist Jack Butler emphasized once more the futility of hiding our heads in the sand and ignoring this alignment of interests between two heavy-duty health villains:

Over the course of last year, two related facts that many had already reasonably intuited became undeniable: Obesity is a coronavirus comorbidity, making people likelier to get it and to suffer seriously from it. And at the same time, lockdowns which increased unhealthy habits overall, contributed to America’s already-extant obesity epidemic, particularly for children.

It is unfortunate that “lockdown” has become the shortcut term representing the whole spectrum of measures designed to prevent the spread of the virus. Compared to what goes on in other parts of the world, to call almost anything that has happened in the USA a “lockdown” is an exercise in hyperbole. But we know what is meant. The closing of schools, daycare centers, parks, gyms, and community centers has taken a toll, in terms of calories unexpunged by exercise. Even without armed enforcers patrolling the streets, American kids have tended to stay indoors more in the past couple of years, sitting on their duffs and spending way too much time engaged with electronic devices.

Words count

Butler also brought up some troublesome details about the official language employed to describe the link between COVID and obesity, and its strangely passive tone at times, which seems to imply that obesity is some kind of curse visited upon us, like a hurricane, rather than a thing that can be predicted, prevented, or maybe even eliminated. It’s as if we are totally at the mercy of not only the virus, but of obesity itself. The writer hints that the terminology sometimes slides into a sort of “political correctness” that has run amok.

He suggests that certain restrictions against physical activity might be considered a futile strategy “that made many people less healthy and more vulnerable to the disease against which the measures were supposedly implemented.” Another of his thoughts is,

We’ll also need to abandon the notion that obesity is just something that happens to people and that they are helpless to do anything about it.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “CDC cites obesity as culprit for hospitalizing children with COVID-19,” KRQE.com, 01/04/22
Source: “CDC Confirms What We Already Knew: Obesity Makes Coronavirus Worse,” NationalReview.com, 01/04/22
Image by Phil Roeder/CC BY 2.0

Addiction and Hard Questions

Branches of the Question Tree

Still Hooked

It really is a journey

System-Roaming Symptoms Find a Voice

Coronavirus Chronicles — Suspicions Arose, Then Voices

Coronavirus Chronicles — Suspicions Arise

Exhausted by life

Coronavirus Chronicles — Long COVID on the Road to Recognition

Where is it?

Coronavirus Chronicles — Is Long COVID a Thing?

Coronavirus Chronicles: The Struggle for Recognition

Not hopeless?

Coronavirus Chronicles — Are Excuses Being Made?

Not exactly news

Words count

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

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