Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

The Absorption of Morton Downey

Pat Hartman May 17, 2021 No Comments

Morton Downey was previously mentioned by Childhood Obesity News in connection with his list of 104 different factors that have been implicated in causing obesity. In an earlier post, we touched on the “obesity villains” with more obvious and straightforward financial roots, like government policy regarding agriculture; advertising that targets children; and snack-vending machines in schools.

For several years, Downey served as executive director of the American Obesity Association, and then for two years as executive vice president of the Obesity Society. One of his successful missions was to convince the IRS that, for the purpose of filling out individual income tax forms, weight-loss treatment expenses should be deductible.

Concerning obesity, his “list of putative causes” page has disappeared from the internet, but it once included these words regarding the large number of factors that have been suggested as contributory to widespread obesity in the contemporary scene:

First, is there some problem with the research methodology that so many and diverse potential causes are identified? Second, are a number of named putative causes symptoms or manifestations of underlying, deeper causes? And what are those? Third, to what extent are identified putative causes reflections of local, regional, ethnic or cultural factors?

Downey’s point was that most of the suspected obesity villains in our lives really have very little to do with the energy balance formulation that the world has become accustomed to accepting. He suggested that there is more to obesity than the traditional calories-in, calories-out paradigm that has become so taken for granted.

The Downey Obesity Report website was acquired by another site, ObviouslyFat.com, that apparently has not made much use of Downey’s material, since his name appears only once in the entire website. But it seems to have been founded very recently, like earlier this year, so maybe more of his writings will eventually emerge.

The new site, which has a very frank fat acceptance vibe, appears to exist specifically to direct customers to obesity-oriented products, of which it has compiled quite a variety. There are guides to mobility scooters, heavy-duty stepladders, and 6XL knee braces. There is specialized patio furniture. Some of the products are very personal, like shower chairs, toilet seats and wiping aids, of which at least five different brands exist.

Others items appear quite useful for the active heavy person who needs a beach chair, hammock, kayak, surfboard, or above-ground pool ladder made to scale. Also, there are sleep aids, from heavy-duty air mattresses to a bed that can support 3,500 pounds. Apparently, there also exists a plus-size chair with convenient holders for up to six beverages.

The page that contains 15 fashion tips for men looks very useful. The main rule is to stay away from baggy clothing and go with the closer-fitting duds instead. And for heaven’s sake, choose decent shoes. Clothing and shoes of course make up a huge category, including a belly band holster touted as the “top concealed carry method for fat guys.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Putative 104 Causes of Obesity Update,” DowneyObesityReport.com, 10/22/15
Source: “Downey Obesity Report Acquisition & Merger — Find Out The Latest,” ObviouslyFat.com, 2021
Image by Tim Pierce/CC BY 2.0

What’s Up With Energy?

Pat Hartman May 14, 2021 No Comments

Inactivity or overeating? For the young, which is the bigger obesity villain? This question, in the words of journalist Gretchen Reynolds,

[…] remains murky and matters, as obesity researchers point out, because we cannot effectively respond to a health crisis unless we know its causes.

People are still talking about the research on…

[…] the lifestyles, diets and body compositions of Amazonian children who live in rural, foraging communities… The in-depth study found that the rural children, who run, play and forage for hours, are leaner and more active than their urban counterparts. But they do not burn more calories day-to-day, a surprising finding that implicates the urban children’s modernized diets in their weight gain.

The Shuar are pretty much hunter-gatherers, with some fishing and subsistence farming added to the mix. Of necessity, their diet includes starchy vegetables, which are not favored by nutritionists. And yet, it is rare for either children or adults to be overweight or to suffer from malnourishment.

The Ecuadorian kids are not the only ones concerned, since the facts are believed to “have implications for the rising rates of obesity in both children and adults worldwide.”

In a previous study, Dr. Sam Urlacher compared the Shuar children’s energy expenditure with that of some sedentary, heavy children in the USA. Turns out, the young Ecuadorians burned pretty much the same number of calories as the overweight North Americans. In the followup study, those rural Shuar children were compared to some Shuar townies, in the same age group and with the same genetic heritage.

The urban Shuar children proved to be considerably heavier than their rural counterparts. About a third were overweight by World Health Organization criteria. None of the rural children were. The urban kids also generally were more sedentary. But all of the children, rural or urban, active or not, burned about the same number of calories every day.

Study co-author Dr. Herman Pontzer of Duke University teaches evolutionary anthropology, with an emphasis on the intersection of evolution and human metabolism. Apparently, the influence goes both ways. Dr. Pontzer had also previously studied the Hadza, hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, who spent their days in moderate-to-strenuous activity while burning “about the same number of total calories daily as much-more-sedentary Westerners.” His thought is that our bodies figure out where to allocate the available energy, according to whatever we are doing with our lives. Reynolds says,

The result is that our average, daily energy expenditure remains within a narrow band of total calories, helpful for avoiding starvation among active hunter-gatherers, but disheartening for those of us in the modern world who find that more exercise does not equate to much, if any, weight loss.

She goes on to quote Dr. Urlacher:

Exercise is still very important for children, for all sorts of reasons. But keeping physical activity up may not be enough to deal with childhood obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Exercise vs. Diet? What Children of the Amazon Can Teach Us About Weight Gain,” NYTimes.com, 02/24/21
Image by Maurizio Costanzo/CC BY 2.0

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure

Pat Hartman May 13, 2021 No Comments

To express the thought behind yesterday’s post another way: Exercise with weight loss as your goal, and you may face disappointment. Exercise to gain dozens of contributory benefits, and for a general feeling of well-being, and you win every day.

Of course, if exercise were the answer to everything, all the time, life would be too simple. Mulling over a color-coded map embodying research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, it is easy to see that in the realm of weight, other factors must be at work. Among the “Percent of adults who are physically inactive,” the most obese states are Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Alabama. It’s as if Mississippi (purple) is the epicenter, with a ring of not-quite-so-bad (red) states around it, and every one of them borders on an orange state. It really is quite visually striking, in a jagged-edged bullseye kind of way.

The blur of reality

Still, many Americans carry a stereotype in our heads about states that tend more toward the rural; a belief that they are populated by wiry farmers, mechanics, horse trainers, etc., who are at the peak of health because their everyday lives entail lots of movement. Today, the residents of those states may not even be particularly slothful, but of course, times change.

A lot of agricultural labor has been automated, so farmworkers are not necessarily doing drastic chores from dawn to dusk. Before the internal combustion engine took over, people in the country, or in semi-rural areas, used to stay fit by walking, chopping wood, and wrangling critters. But although some country folk still do hard physical labor, and get plenty of exercise, a huge number are overweight or obese. (Side note: In the face of all this, it seems paradoxical for city dwellers to blame their obesity on the “built environment.”)

Six of one, half a dozen of the other

Remember “The Bus Conductors’ Secret“? It raised the question: Do strenuous jobs make people fit, or do fit people apply for and get hired for strenuous jobs? Even the most meticulous studies can seem to contradict each other. Does living in a two-story house or an upstairs apartment increase longevity? Do out-of-shape people abandon living quarters that have stairs, or tend not to move in, in the first place? Population “epidemiology” is fraught with missing basic factors, or misinterpretation of cause and effect.

A study of children in Ecuador raised puzzling questions, which we will look at next. The only point where there is consensus is that overweight adults probably started out as overweight children. That seems to be the one truth to which we can stubbornly cling. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Physical Inactivity in the United States,” StateOfChildhoodObesity.org, 2019
Image by Kevan/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Pain of Adaptation

Pat Hartman May 12, 2021 No Comments

Although for many people, physical exercise is an important part of their program to vanquish obesity, a contrary belief holds that exercisers tend to negate their extra physical activity by eating more. There is a study of Ecuadorian children that we will surely mention again, of which journalist Gretchen Reynolds wrote in The New York Times,

When children gain excess weight, the culprit is more likely to be eating too much than moving too little… The findings also raise provocative questions about the interplay of physical activity and metabolism and why exercise helps so little with weight loss, not only in children but the rest of us, too.

Disappointment with an effort that does not immediately produce an astonishing change can discourage people from pursuing change at all. Perhaps the best thing for people is to disconnect the idea of weight loss from the idea of exercise, and eliminate that mental link when arranging their daily routines.

This is especially important in a time when many Americans are constrained by circumstances from using the means and facilities they were accustomed to. Maybe the neighborhood gym only allows six people in at a time, or maybe the financial crisis of the pandemic closed it forever. According to The Wall Street Journal, gyms have been one of the hardest-hit industries. The cost of cleaning products alone is significant.

Formerly devoted customers have been forced to cut expenses, and neglected to renew their memberships. As a result, an estimated three million health club jobs have vanished. Huge companies, including the iconic Gold’s Gym, have gone bankrupt.

Belief systems clash

Financial pressure is not the only factor that makes things difficult. For adults, the conflict has encroached on what used to be one of the most ideology-free environments existing in the country. Now, some people refuse to work out in a face mask, while others will shun a gym that does not require masks.

Some wonder whether spacing the stationary bikes farther apart even helps to prevent the spread of aerosol droplets. Others are so eager, they will sneak into a closed gym with keys they previously had, or tell the press that even though they gave up restaurant dining and travel, a gym workout is the only “risk activity” they can’t abandon.

Businesses are willing to adapt and cater more to the at-home fitness buffs, which is lovely, except that the pandemic is also causing people to lose their homes. If the choice is between paying rent or buying a set of kettlebells, rent tends to win. Still, people who have equipment at home, and even those who are working with minimal environmental support, like a floor and a stairway, can buy streaming classes from their gyms or find guidance on YouTube for free.

And they may not be primarily seeking weight loss, but a whole spectrum of benefits that accrue from exercise, some of which undoubtedly connect indirectly with weight loss. It is not only a physical quest but a psychological one as well.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Exercise vs. Diet? What Children of the Amazon Can Teach Us About Weight Gain,” NYTimes.com, 02/24/21
Source: “Gyms Are Reopening, but Everything’s Different,” WSJ.com, 03/16/21
Image by Ms. Phoenix/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Keep It Moving

Pat Hartman May 11, 2021 No Comments

This page has spoken of Alasdair Wilkins, who lost 100 pounds by spending an hour each day walking an uphill treadmill while watching movies. One of his notable quotations is, “I was thinking about my weight loss on a very small scale: I just wanted to feel better…”

And this is why the question of physical exercise is so vital, no matter when. In what we tend to call “normal” times (although no times really are), people face limitations and barriers that keep them from experiencing a helpful amount of physical movement. The pandemic just happens to exaggerate the problem. More than ever, people need to feel better.

Stuck at home?

Take parents, for example. Sometimes it can be very stressful for parents to spend a lot of time around the children. Also, painful as it may be for grownups to acknowledge, children can find it quite stressful to spend too much time around their parents. Everybody needs to chill out, and strenuous physical exercise is a proven route to contented exhaustion. Habitual exercisers swear that it improves their moods.

When people are in better moods, they are easier to get along with, and also find others easier to tolerate. Even in the face of restricted access to venues specifically designed for exercise, it is possible to do enough movement to keep the blood and lymph circulating efficiently. Consider all the film and television drama scenes that show a prisoner staying fit within the limitations of a tiny cell. Kids and grownups can do that kind of thing at home. Stretching is good too, and can be accomplished in a very small space.

Saving our lives with our legs

For the benefit of their cardiovascular systems and bone density, children need an hour of movement each day, and most kids — eight out of 10 in Great Britain, for instance — don’t have that. Journalist Peter Walker writes in The Guardian,

If we don’t use our biggest muscles, notably in our legs, for long periods, there is a cellular effect that makes our bodies less good at breaking down certain fats, which can affect the way they process glucose.

Walker discusses the work of Harvard professor I-Min Lee, whose field of expertise is inactivity, and who teaches that “doing something is almost always better than nothing.” He references a recent study showing that taking 4,400 steps per day will actually keep an old woman alive longer than taking 2,400 steps per day.

Regular cyclists live longer, too. Even 10 minutes of exercise per day can be a life-changer. Walker writes,

And when you do start moving, the impact is immediate in effect, and astounding in extent. The US government guidelines on activity note that, on the same day you manage a single period of moderate-to-vigorous activity, you will see a reduction in blood pressure, better insulin sensitivity, improved sleep, fewer anxiety symptoms, and improved cognitive function.

Walker was told by expert Steve Blair that the best kind of activity to choose is “The one you’ll do and keep doing.” Which is exactly what mega-weight-loser Alasdair Wilkins told reporters who eagerly interviewed him. He tried the treadmill/movie combo, discovered that it wasn’t so bad, and realized that he wouldn’t mind doing it again tomorrow. No big deal.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “‘Inactivity is an ongoing pandemic’: the life-saving impact of moving your body,” TheGuardian.com, 02/06/21
Image by Earl McGehee/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Assorted Parents and Their Ways

Pat Hartman May 10, 2021 No Comments

The paradigm of the cozy nuclear family, with mother and father and 2.2 children, is far from the norm. Especially in these perilous times, all kinds of relatives, friends, and acquaintances find themselves in motley households, out of necessity. But there are still many parent couples left, and what they need to do is buttress, and not undermine, each other. More than ever, parents need to cooperate, and that holds true whether they are together or apart.

Cohabiting parents

Parents are going crazy, at a time they most need to keep their heads. In parts of the country where circumstances are really rough, it’s all about day-to-day survival. In other places, food shortages have barely manifested, and the easiest thing to do is stay in, eat, sleep, consume media, and possibly even engage in a bit of substance misuse. Most of the outlets through which people let off steam and regain their emotional equilibrium are not available.

Being half of a partnership makes everything more fraught. Parents need to have private conversations and opportunities for other sorts of intimacy. If at all possible, they might find ways to give each other relief from child care, even when everyone is unavoidably together. If one parent can give the other even a half-hour break, that can be a blessing.

Of course, professional help from a therapist (virtual or otherwise) is very much to be desired, but even though online consultation with a professional is easier than ever, many factors keep people from taking advantage of the available opportunities.

Turn it up to 11

As if all that was not stressful enough, what about the former couples who have moved apart and moved on, but who share custody of a child, or children? Co-parenting can get incredibly messy. When kids move from one household to another, especially with an expanded cast of characters, things can become complicated.

Even at the best of times, divorced parents can tend to be careless about things like allergies, junk food, sleep schedules, and screen time. Often, they get up to real mischief, trying to outdo each other as the beneficent dispenser of treats. They might curry favor by neglecting to set boundaries or behavior standards. They might ridicule such ideas as serving vegetables or measuring food servings. Prompted by insecurity and hostility, they might expect the children to be little snitches.

In the pandemic scenario, indifferent parents might let the handwashing slide and the masks get lost. The kids mingle within the alternate household’s exclusive “bubble” which might — who knows? — comprise 100 people. Will they take the kids’ temperatures? Do they know the warning signs that should trigger serious concern?

Parents who share custody can’t be blamed for wondering, “Can I trust those people to keep the kids — and, by extension, me — safe from contagion? Or are they going to do something stupid, just to prove some goofy point?” Natasha Caleel wrote of people she knew,

There were parents who were using COVID-19 as leverage in custody battles, parents unable to take time off from essential jobs, parents losing their jobs altogether, or even worse, parents who were worried about matters such as neglect or abuse.

Nobody wants their child to get the virus, because of its intrinsic danger, and also because being sick is one of the gateways to meaningful obesity. Nobody wants their child to become obese, for all the reasons that existed before, and because the virus targets people who are carrying extra pounds. It’s an all-around raw deal.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “My Ex And I Are Co-parenting Amid COVID-19, And It’s Full Of Unexpected Challenges,” HuffPost.com, 12/31/20
Image by spader/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Problems Not Readily Visible

Pat Hartman May 7, 2021 No Comments

Because of the pandemic disease itself and the inexorable reach of its influence and restrictions, people are a mess. We have depression, anxiety, grief, trauma, panic, agoraphobia, substance misuse, eating disorders, and PTSD.

In far too many lives, economic stress is a constant. Uncertainty takes a heavy toll, especially for people who are obliged to provide for others. Someone might be very confident about their own ability to “tough it out” during a bad patch, but when there are a partner and a child or five to be responsible for and worry about, the whole game changes.

People actively experiencing COVID-19 or recovering from it are, as we learned, susceptible to mental health disorders. And so, it turns out, are parents. The American Psychological Association recently issued a report on the mental and physical health of more than 3,000 parents whose under-18 children still live at home.

Nobody said it would be easy

Parents face two distinct sets of problems, their own and other people’s. Three-quarters of the adult subjects said they would have liked more emotional reinforcement than they got during 2020. No doubt, the same can be said of children. They too have felt deprived of emotional support. The hugely painful irony here is that the people who theoretically care about each other the most, are the very ones who cause the angst.

At any age, the people who are the most willing to help are sometimes the least able. And the ones who potentially are the most able to help, are not willing. Little kids, ideally, are able to brighten their parents’ lives, but too many children are asked to shoulder adult emotional burdens and compensate for what is missing in the adults’ relationship.

Where is obesity in this?

Everywhere. As we have seen, COVID-19 and the avoidance of it, and eating disorders, and mental health glitches, all exacerbate each other. Senior reporter Catherine Pearson writes in HuffPost,

55% of dads and 47% of moms say they’ve gained weight since the pandemic began, with an average of about 45 pounds for fathers and 27 pounds for mothers. Furthermore, just under half of dads in the survey said they were drinking more alcohol to cope with the pandemic, while about 30% of mothers said the same.

Many parents, needless to say, are not in the best frame of mind for putting their children’s chubby tummies at the top of the priority list. One of the oldest rules in the book is, “Pick your battles.” When parents are stressed about making sure the kids do their lessons and don’t bash each other’s brains in, snack policing might be the last thing on their minds. Remote learning is nobody’s idea of fun, as proven by the emotionally drained state of many parents who have to cope with it. Pearson writes,

Roughly half of mothers whose children are still learning at home reported their mental health has worsened since the pandemic began, while 30% of fathers whose children are still learning at home said the same.

Whether in the home or outside, a parent might feel the need to put a good face on it and pretend to love how the plague has given us the opportunity to spend so much time with the family. To keep up that kind of a facade is psychologically exhausting.

This era, the study authors say, will leave behind “lasting physical and psychological effects,” and no one yet has any idea how far from the end of it we are.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “New Report Shows Just How Much American Parents Are Flailing Right Now,” HuffPost.com, 03/15/21
Image by waferboard/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Our Inner Workings and COVID-19

Pat Hartman May 6, 2021 No Comments

COVID-19 currently reigns over the globe, and the mental health aspects of that are all mixed up with concerns about obesity. The 236,379-subject study we mentioned found that coronavirus survivors do not always actually get over it, in the sense of returning to their pre-illness states of health and well-being. Instead, half a year later, about one-third of them suffer from neurological and mental health malfunctions.

Journalist Sarah Marsh sums up,

The most common diagnoses after Covid were anxiety disorders (occurring in 17% of patients), mood disorders (14%), substance misuse disorders (7%), and insomnia (5%)… After taking into account underlying health characteristics, such as age, sex, ethnicity and existing health conditions, there was a 44% greater risk of neurological and mental health diagnoses after Covid-19 than after flu.

Predictions say that primary and secondary care services are about to get slammed, prompting Dr. Jonathan Rogers, of University College London, to say:

Sadly, many of the disorders identified in this study tend to be chronic or recurrent, so we can anticipate that the impact of Covid-19 could be with us for many years.

Oxford University’s Prof Paul Harrison, the lead author of the aforementioned study, says:

Although the individual risks for most disorders are small, the effect across the whole population may be substantial for health and social care systems due to the scale of the pandemic and that many of these conditions are chronic.

So much for the “blood-brain barrier”

Scientists suspect that the action of SARS-CoV-2 on the brain can cause long-term neurological problems. For experimental purposes, they used stem cells to cultivate “organoids,” and turned the virus loose on them. No direct infection of neuronal cells was observed.

But the choroid plexus epithelial cells, which produce and secrete cerebrospinal fluid? That’s a different story. Those cells express ACE2, a cellular protein that COVID has a key to. So the choroid plexus layer can be infected by the virus, which proceeds to move in and reproduce itself. Even leaving neuronal cells out of it, explains Dr. Melanie Krause, it is alarming that the virus can damage the choroid plexus layer…

[…] because some proteins that usually make up the tight contacts between the cells were mislocalised. This caused brain-barrier leakage, which in humans could enable the entry of pathogens, immune cells and cytokines into cerebrospinal fluid and the brain, and potentially lead to neuroinflammation. This in turn could result in long-term neurological symptoms, such as chronic fatigue and memory loss.

The next step is to figure out whether the virus is able to spread through the body via the cerebrospinal fluid.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “One in three survivors of severe Covid diagnosed with mental health condition,” TheGuardian.com, 04/07/21
Source: “Organoids indicate that SARS-CoV-2 damages the brain barrier,” BioNews.org, 10/26/20
Image by red, white and black eyes/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Assailed From All Sides

Pat Hartman May 5, 2021 No Comments

The virus and obesity share many meeting places, and mental health is a major collaboration hub for them. The direct and indirect effects of living (or dying) with COVID-19 are horrible for emotional stability. Psychological turmoil is bad for people with eating disorders, including the ones that cause obesity. Obesity is good for the virus, which, for its own mysterious reasons, prefers victims with extra fat stores.

Besides obesity, the virus has a hankering for other morbidities and pre-existing conditions. Like an ambitious mobster, it will go into business with anyone who offers enough profit. Poor mental and emotional health leads to feelings of helplessness, alienation, giving up, worthlessness, self-destructiveness, isolation, loss of hope, etc., and POW! the virus scores again, because those are the exact states of mind and spirit that entice people into dangerous neighborhoods like “vaccine hesitation” and mask refusal.

Some humans are deluded enough to expect the virus to give us credit for loving our families and sustaining other human relationships. Would COVID-19 be mean enough to punish us for wanting to be with other good people? Yes. The virus doesn’t care about anything except its own agenda. It wants us to carry it to our parents and grandparents and children and best friends. It preempts our finest qualities, our love and loyalty and longing to meet with others in person, and turns them into weapons against us. And some of us play right into its hands.

The hysterical, the cavalier, and other attitudes

There is more to isolation than the physical dimension. It is common to feel rejected and judged by others who seem either way too uptight in their insistence on pandemic precautions, or pathologically unconcerned. The previous Childhood Obesity News post mentions journalist Kristen Rogers, who says,

Excessive handwashing and fears of contamination can be hallmarks of obsessive-compulsive disorder — now and in the future, some people with OCD may feel comforted by the public’s acceptance of safety behaviors, but also struggle to not become increasingly obsessive.

Issues arise when someone is forced to live with people who are not on the same page about household habits. One example: For someone with an eating disorder, it might be a very good idea to set strict limits on the amount of food allowed in the home at any time. But now, a person who has spent years learning discipline loses the hard-won autonomy. Other household members don’t want to observe those limitations. With shortages, you don’t know when flour will be available again, so better stock up until the pantry is full.

When every package of the favorite snack might be the last, behavior slips the leash. Anxiety about future availability makes people want to binge. Or purge. Or both. The very idea of terminal food shortages is grotesque, and yet all too possible. As either a paranoid fantasy or a stone-cold reality, the notion of running out of food is a mind-bender.

But wait, there is more. People who are seriously thrown off their mental and emotional balance might not rank a vaccination appointment as their first priority. So the virus wins again. And obesity or some other malady scores another point, too.

A perfect storm for all the players

Take a terrifying pandemic, and add in a bunch of people with emotional and psychological problems, and you’ve got present-day reality. Rogers, who is strong on both identifying main issues and generating cogent quotations, predicts:

[W]hat will likely still remain is the indelible impact of the pandemic weighing on the collective psyche… [T]he mental darkness of the crisis will be harder to overcome.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Mental health is one of the biggest pandemic issues we’ll face in 2021,” CNN.com, cnn.com, 01/04/21
Image by NIH Image Gallery/Public Domain

Coronavirus Chronicles — A Case for Mental Health

Pat Hartman May 4, 2021 No Comments

In order to avoid obesity or any other disorder, it helps a lot if the family (or affinity group) has good mental health. It rarely takes more than one sentence to bring the subject around to obesity’s equally destructive twin, COVID-19.

A recent multi-author study described the fates of virus survivors. The work is titled “6-month neurological and psychiatric outcomes in 236,379 survivors of COVID-19: a retrospective cohort study using electronic health records.” The number of survivors, 236,379, is a generous number on which to base conclusions. The six-months part indicates that the patients were surveyed a full half-year after they were deemed recovered.

In summation,

— Various adverse neurological and psychiatric outcomes occurring after COVID-19 have been predicted and reported.
— COVID-19 is followed by significant rates of neurological and psychiatric diagnoses over the subsequent 6 months.
— The severity of COVID-19 had a clear effect on subsequent neurological diagnoses.

As would be expected, the report includes a plethora of unpleasant details, all physical in origin because the virus is a physical entity. But these maladies branch out into anxiety and mood disorders; nightmares, apnea, and other sleep disturbances; substance addiction or the collapse of recovery; psychotic episodes, dementia, and other emotional/psychological manifestations.

As always, scientists emphasize that more research is needed:

Finally, a study of this kind can only show associations; efforts to identify mechanisms and assess causality will require prospective cohort studies and additional study designs.

Main points

CNN associate feature writer Kristen Rogers identifies the germane issues. As straitened circumstances and never-ending challenges are added to already stress-filled lives, existence can “feel like a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole.” It is just all so unrelenting. Burnout is definitely a factor.

Many people do not enjoy the opportunity or space to move around enough to serve either physical or mental health. Feelings of isolation and loneliness can be painful. The converse problem is the inability to attain isolation, as Americans lose jobs (or transportation) and move in with relatives and friends, and a lot of people are working and/or schooling at home.

Telehealth sessions with a therapist are a wonderful invention, but in a crowded environment, things might get awkward. And to be without a support system can set a person free to binge or whatever. Rogers writes:

Without support and accountability, some people’s recovery from eating disorders and substance use disorders has hit a wall. For those who aren’t ready to recover or are still active in their disorders, isolation has been an opportunity to sustain disordered behaviors — a chance for which some may be grateful, while others are distraught.

“Some disorders thrive in isolation,” the author says, and this is certainly true of eating disorders. If nobody comes over, the habit of hiding cheese all over the house is a non-problem.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “6-month neurological and psychiatric outcomes in 236 379 survivors of COVID-19…,” TheLancet.com, 04/06/21
Source: “Mental health is one of the biggest pandemic issues we’ll face in 2021,” CNN.com, 01/04/21
Image by Transformer 18/CC BY-ND 2.0

The Absorption of Morton Downey

What’s Up With Energy?

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure

The blur of reality

Six of one, half a dozen of the other

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Pain of Adaptation

Belief systems clash

Coronavirus Chronicles — Keep It Moving

Stuck at home?

Saving our lives with our legs

Coronavirus Chronicles — Assorted Parents and Their Ways

Cohabiting parents

Turn it up to 11

Coronavirus Chronicles — Problems Not Readily Visible

Nobody said it would be easy

Where is obesity in this?

Coronavirus Chronicles — Our Inner Workings and COVID-19

So much for the “blood-brain barrier”

Coronavirus Chronicles — Assailed From All Sides

The hysterical, the cavalier, and other attitudes

A perfect storm for all the players

Coronavirus Chronicles — A Case for Mental Health

Main points

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources