Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Changing Landscape

Pat Hartman April 7, 2021 No Comments

Over the past year, according to a study published by Pediatrics, it appears that childhood obesity increased by 2%. That may not sound very impressive, but it is alarming. To put it another way: Last time a count was made, 13.7% of kids were obese, and the most recent count is 15.4%. To spin the thought in yet another direction, the title of a piece by Anuradha Varanasi says it all — “Obesity Epidemic Accounts For More Than $170 Billion In Surplus Medical Costs Per Year In The United States: Study.”

In this context, the surplus has nothing to do with old Army canteens. The annual cost of medical care is $170 billion more than it would have been if no one were obese. And yet…

[P]eople with severe obesity are the most impacted as their excess health care costs go over $3000 a year. Seven out of ten adults and three out of ten children in the United States currently have overweight or obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It is no coincidence that obesity and COVID-19 have once again created a cozy partnership for the furtherance of both their interests.

The truth hurts

In the current childhood obesity landscape, COVID-19 is by far the biggest player. It makes kids miserable, which makes them fat. Or, if they are already fat, it makes them more miserable. Among the young, in the area of long-range effects, two different things appear to be going on — PASC and MIS-C. But with the state of COVID-19 science in its infancy, who knows? It could be possible that they are both actually the same condition. Stranger things have happened.

Few psychological experiences are more painful than when a fortress of certainty crumbles into dust. Large parts of the world have finally acknowledged that children can both suffer from and transmit the virus. After a certain point, more and more authorities began to say things like this:

For many patients, including young ones who never required hospitalization, Covid-19 has a devastating second act. Many are dealing with symptoms weeks or months after they were expected to recover, often with puzzling new complications that can affect the entire body — severe fatigue, cognitive issues and memory lapses, digestive problems, erratic heart rates, headaches, dizziness, fluctuating blood pressure, even hair loss.

Just like adults, children can not only catch the virus, they can experience “long covid.” Journalist Megan E. Doherty quoted Sean O’Leary, of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, who said, “It does seem to be a real phenomenon that it may be happening in kids.” This was just over six months ago, and Doherty went on to say,

[W]hile the CDC recently reported that as many as 20 percent of those aged 18 to 34 who have Covid-19 experience lasting symptoms, there’s no similar data available on children and younger teens.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “‘Striking’ Increase in Childhood Obesity During Pandemic,” WebMD.com, 03/30/21
Source: “The United States: Study,” Forbes.com, 03/31/21
Source: “Doctors Begin to Crack Covid’s Mysterious Long-Term Effects,” MSN.com, 11/1/2020
Source: “When Children’s Covid-19 Symptoms Won’t Go Away,” Undark.org, 09/20/20
Image by Tom Page/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Long-Range Danger

Pat Hartman April 6, 2021 No Comments

The pandemic exerts on children many indirect or second-order effects. Those are bad enough, but of course, the worst-case scenario is for a child to actually come down with the sickness. Which, contrary to earlier beliefs, they certainly can do, and they also play a part in spreading it.

There also used to be an assumption that patients classified as having “mild” covid recover in a couple of weeks, which has been shown to be not totally accurate. Like adults, kids can stay sick for a long time. The subject is confusing because sometimes, in speech or print, people use the same words while mentally defining those words in different ways.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says most people who get COVID-19, recover from it. Does “recovered” mean they are discharged from the hospital? Does it mean they have the same level of health and wellness as before? Does it mean they simply hung onto life?

Does it mean a five-year survival rate? Obviously, nobody knows about the last question, because there are, of necessity, no five-year followup studies. Similarly, WHO says “Catching COVID-19 does not mean you will have it for life.” But technically, literally, millions of people have had it “for life,” because it directly or indirectly caused their deaths.

It is puzzling to see, every now and then, a quotation to the effect that while the active disease usually isn’t very bad, some symptoms, like tachycardia and memory loss, can continue for months. Common sense would seem to suggest that, when such troubling symptoms persist, they are not after-effects but are, in fact, part and parcel of the disease.

What do we really know?

Also according to WHO, most COVID-19 victims suffer symptoms ranging from mild to moderate. A person might ask what kind of time frame is involved. The condition called “long covid” has been recognized as a thing, and nobody knows how long it can potentially stay with a person. Who wants to deal with moderate symptoms, or even mild symptoms, every day for months, or years?

Considering the newness of the disease and the ever-increasing reports of long-term consequences, it does seem a bit audacious for humans to proclaim that they can’t have it for life. Studies imply parameters, and time is a notoriously inflexible one.

We are assured that patients “can recover thanks to supportive care,” which could mean a friend arranging for grocery delivery, or in some cases, several months in the actual hospital, under the strictest and most expensively-maintained conditions. Again, the more it is thought about, the less comforting it sounds.

This long-term menace does not apply only to adults, who may have already messed up their bodies, with some kind of complicated and complicating situation going on. When children appear to get off easy, with barely any symptoms, it may not be that simple. Nobody knows yet the long-range effects on kids, but at least some attention is being paid.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public: Mythbusters,” WHO.int, 03/26/21
Image by Bill Smith/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Children and Second-Order Consequences

Pat Hartman April 5, 2021 No Comments

The coronavirus pandemic has pervasive knock-on effects for children who never personally contract the illness. Restrictions and justifiable fears have kept the youngest generation away from their schools, their team sports, their violin lessons, their routine vaccinations and wellness visits, and innumerable other activities that we used to think of as normal. Kids are missing out on significant family events like weddings, and important youth occasions like proms, recitals, performances, and field trips.

Home, bitter home

The concerned public hears plenty about those deprivations, but not so much about the mundane and ongoing misery of parents who are overwhelmed by having their kids around All. The. Time. They have to invent things for their offspring to do, and teach them at home, and figure out how to operate the technology to make it happen. They have to explain why Uncle Charlie scoffs at the safety rules, and why people need to mask and distance, even if so-called friends mock them for taking health precautions.

Parents who never expected to be called upon for full-time childcare have been drafted into service, because the other partner is the one who can get a job, or is required to self-quarantine, or is actually sick and hospitalized. Then, there are the parents who got over a case of the virus and test negative, but who are still trying to convalesce from a serious illness that in some cases lasts far beyond its advertised shelf life.

Parents may be rendered incapable

We have discussed the extensive list of physical problems that adult patients may suffer for months and possibly years after their alleged recovery. Craig Spencer, an expert in global health emergency medicine, told the press,

What people need to know is the pandemic’s toll is likely much higher than we are imagining… There will be people living with the impact of COVID long after the pandemic is over.

Dayna McCarthy, an expert in rehabilitation medicine, added,

My goodness, the economic implications of this. You’re talking a huge number of 20-to-40-year-olds — our workforce — who now can’t work.

What other characteristic is shared by a huge number of people between 20 and 40? They are parents. If Mom has to recover from gall bladder surgery, she can maybe send one or two children to a neighbor’s. Better yet, ask Grandma to visit for a week. But the virus is a whole different scenario, a real mess. What neighbor wants to take the risk? And bringing an elderly person into contact with an active case is to absolutely be avoided.

And then, what if Mom or Dad turns out to have Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or PASC? Journalist Meghan O’Rourke interviewed a 38-year-old doctor who was said to have recovered from a supposedly mild case. But soon Jessica Cohen found herself back in the emergency room as a patient. The consensus emerged that she might have been weakened from a week in bed, so she resolved to push herself a little harder. She collapsed walking up a flight of stairs, and other scary things happened. O’Rourke writes,

One day she walked four blocks with her daughter to the store, where her heart began racing so fast that she had to sit down on the sidewalk until her husband came to pick them up.

Imagine being that child. Parents are the pillars that hold up the world. To see a parent struck down is to experience primal terror. What if a woman can’t afford a cell phone for such occasions? What if a child is too young to even realize that something is wrong? After all, Mama sits on the floor at home, it’s no big deal. Imagine being that mother, watching a two-year-old wander off down the street because you are too weak to get back on your feet.

Another interviewee “occasionally relies on her husband to carry her up the front steps to their home.” How could someone fulfill parent duties in this condition? Describing her long-term alleged recovery, that patient said,

I don’t need the wheelchair in the house… I am making progress. But the progress is not that I can walk two miles instead of one. It’s that I can walk for 20 seconds across a room.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID,” TheAtlantic.com, 03/08/21
Image by Nick and Dana Blizzard/CC BY-ND 2.0

Overweight and Obese Pregnancy

Pat Hartman April 2, 2021 No Comments

As we have seen in the context of a reality TV star’s pregnancy, an obese mother who has undergone bariatric surgery might experience nutritional deficiencies that can affect the developing fetus, especially if she did not wait long enough to let her body become accustomed to its new situation.

But that is not all. Sadly, the risk can apply to any expectant mother. Whole industries have been built on prenatal nutrition. Iron and folic acid have been particularly emphasized, and more recently, Vitamin D has been brought to the foreground.

Government guidelines recommend fatty fish, orange juice, eggs, and fortified milk, because Vitamin D is seen as essential for the baby’s bones and teeth. Recently, another reason for concern became apparent, summarized in the title, “Pregnant women deficient in vitamin D may give birth to obese children.” Journalist Zen Vuong wrote,

Animal studies have shown that vitamin D suppresses pre-fat cells (adipocytes) from maturing into fat cells. Test tube studies of human fat cells also showed that vitamin D may hinder pre-fat cells from turning into fat cells.

Naturally, other researchers came along and wondered what this might imply for pregnant humans. A team from USC’s Keck School of Medicine suspected that Vitamin D deficiency might “preprogram babies to grow into obese children and adults.”

They looked at women who had registered very low levels of Vitamin D during their first trimesters of gestation, and then looked at their children at age six. These children had 2% more body fat and half-inch larger waistlines than the children of mothers who had been Vitamin D-sufficient during the same stage of pregnancy.

This may not sound like a big deal, but by now it has become very obvious that giving childhood obesity even the tiniest head start can result in a snowball effect. The earlier obesity gets a foothold, and the longer it persists, the more difficult it will be to ever escape. The study’s senior author, associate professor Vaia Lida Chatzi, told the press,

It’s possible that children of mothers with low vitamin D have higher body mass index and body fat because vitamin D appears to disrupt the formation of fat cells. Optimal vitamin D levels in pregnancy could protect against childhood obesity…

Despite increased suspicion, even more pregnant women are Vitamin D-deficient than ever, about two-thirds of them, in fact.

Obese moms result in obese kids

Here are a couple of intriguing notes on the causation of childhood obesity. A recent French study suggests that…

[…] the triggering of stress in a complex membrane system within all cells called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). That stress leads to critical changes in the development of the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that controls hunger, satiety, and metabolic rate.

A recent report looks at the possibilities inherent in various anti-obesity interventions delivered during a child’s first two years, to counteract the risk incurred by parental weight and other conditions. Another article describes a projected five-year study, saying,

Although pregnancy complications, such as gestational diabetes and large-for-gestational-age birthweight have been associated with increased obesity risk in offspring, very few successful interventions in pregnancy have been identified… Data regarding maternal glycaemia in pregnancy, maternal nutrition, infant birthweight, offspring feeding behavior and milk composition will also be collected.

Meanwhile, it is important to spare a thought for overweight and obese mothers-to-be. Even the most uncomplicated pregnancy can include a plethora of side effects — fatigue, nausea, frequent urination, constipation, dizziness, broken sleep, heartburn, hemorrhoids, leg cramps, shortness of breath, swollen feet and legs, backache, congestion, gas, fluid retention, and more.

Now imagine dealing with all those miserable symptoms when every unit of discomfort is exaggerated by the presence of an extra 50, 100, or 200 maternal pounds. Mothers and babies need all the help they can get.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Pregnant women deficient in vitamin D may give birth to obese children,” USC.edu, 02/13/18
Source: “Cellular stress makes obese mothers have obese babies,” MedicalXpress.com, 03/16/20
Source: “Addressing obesity in the first 1000 days in high risk infants: Systematic review,” NIH.gov, 03/29/21
Source: “Antenatal Determinants of Childhood Obesity in High-Risk Offspring: Protocol for the DiGest Follow-Up Study,” MDPI.com, January 2021
Image by Frank de Kleine/CC BY 2.0

Obese Plus Pregnant — Proceed With Caution

Pat Hartman April 1, 2021 No Comments

If only this were an April Fool joke — but sadly, the phenomenon discussed here is all too serious. An overwhelming pile of evidence says that obese women tend to produce obese children. In 2016, more than two-thirds of America’s reproductive-age women were overweight or obese — a statistic that can only have worsened since then.

Researchers reported that a high-fat, high-sugar diet, fed to a pre-pregnant and pregnant mouse, can affect the lives of not only her pups, but the “grand-pups, and great-grand pups.” Even when those descendants are given healthful rodent chow, they tend to develop insulin resistance and related abnormalities of the metabolic system, that make them susceptible to diabetes and obesity. According to MedicalDaily.com,

[T]he mother’s mitochondrial DNA, which is responsible for converting food into energy, becomes defective in the unfertilized egg as a result of poor diet choices. Because mitochondria has its own set of genes that are inherited only from the mother and not the father, researchers conclude that the defect is passed on exclusively from the mother’s bloodline.

Within weeks, Genome Medicine published a study of pregnant women’s eating habits that revealed more about how the process of converting food to energy can be corrupted:

Women who ate more fat on a regular basis significantly decreased the babies’ levels of Bacteroides in the gut — a key species of bacteria that’s designed to break down and extract energy from carbohydrates.

[R]esearchers… sequenced the DNA of the infants’ bacterial community and found it confirmed the mothers’ diets were a prediction of how their babies’ guts would poorly process carbohydrates in the long run.

The following year, JAMA Pediatrics published a study showing that…

[…] obesity during pregnancy places women at a higher risk of having an infant with macrosomia, a condition characterized by atypically large body size at birth…

Obese women tend to have fetuses with not only bigger bodies, but bigger heads, which could be an “ouch” situation from the mothers’ perspective.

Head size does not predict intelligence

By now, the public is well aware that exposure to lead in early childhood can have dire consequences. Not long ago, a UT Austin research team found that being born to an obese mother can have the same IQ-lowering effect, at least in boys. Before that problem even has a chance to become evident, a precursor effect shows up when boys are very young, with markedly lagging motor skills development.

Assistant professor of nutritional sciences Elizabeth Widen told a reporter that dietary and behavioral differences may be responsible, or fetal development could be influenced by events that “tend to happen in the bodies of people with too much extra weight, such as inflammation, metabolic stress, hormonal disruptions and high amounts of insulin and glucose.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Obese Pregnant Women With Poor Diets May Worsen The Childhood Obesity Epidemic: Study,” MedicalDaily.com, 06/16/16
Source: “Eating A High-Fat Diet When Pregnant Could Hurt Your Baby’s Gut Health,”  MedicalDaily.com, 08/08/16
Source: “Fetuses of obese mothers have higher weight, larger head circumferences and some longer bones, according to a new study,” MDMag.com, November 2017
Source: “Obesity in pregnant moms linked to lag in their sons’ development and IQ,” NeuroscienceNews.com, 12/20/19
Image by We the happy people

Obese Fan Fave Took Risk

Pat Hartman March 31, 2021 No Comments

The siblings known as the thousand-pound sisters, Tammy and Amy Slaton, were the subjects of the previous post. Amy lost enough weight on her own to qualify for bariatric surgery and underwent the gastric bypass procedure.

From a starting point of over 400 pounds, she shrank to 276; and also got pregnant about four months after her surgery, a move that is not recommended. Women in this situation are usually advised to wait at least two years. Fans of the media personality were pleased that baby boy Gage was born healthy (delivered by C-section because he was in breech position) at 5 pounds, 6 ounces.

But why the recommendation to wait as long as 24 months before embarking on a pregnancy? Because there can be complications — serious ones, like miscarriage, which occurs at a higher than the average rate to women who are a year or a year and a half post-bariatric surgery. It seems important for the mother’s body weight to stabilize, and for any nutrient deficiencies to be detected and corrected. Bariatric surgeon Dr. Michael Fishman says,

We know the risk of miscarriage is extremely high in the first 12 to 18 months after having weight loss surgery. Your body is working so hard to help this fetus grow but at the same time, you’re dropping all this weight. It’s counterintuitive to what a body should be doing during a pregnancy.

Now, leaving aside bariatric patients, what happens with maternal obesity in general?

Way back in 2015, researchers from three universities got together and studied pregnant obese women. They found problems that affect not only the mother, but the baby — among them, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, and depression. Can this unwanted sharing include the passing along of obesity? Apparently, it can, as some authorities believe that “babies actually begin to become fat in the womb.”

Obesity expert Professor Donal O’Shea spoke of how the body-fat distribution of an obese mother’s fetus could develop differently, and how a baby’s appetite and eating patterns are influenced by insulin and insulin resistance. He said,

People have a tendency to put on too much weight in pregnancy and this increases the blood-sugar level of the mother-to-be, which in turn increases the blood-sugar level of the baby and predisposes it to be large at birth — and to potentially be at increased risk of overweight in childhood.

Professor Neena Modi, described at the time as the United Kingdom’s top pediatrician,
“warned that the country’s National Health Service was wasting millions on anti-obesity strategies targeting young people rather than pregnant women.”

A 2015 study compared groups of children, to conclude that maternal glycemia (the concentration of glucose in the blood) is “associated with some childhood anthropometric measures of obesity but not with subsequent body mass index, fasting glucose or insulin resistance.” Maternal obesity was found to be definitely associated with metabolic dysfunction and obesity in their offspring. Mark B. Landon, M.D. said,

We have known for some time that maternal glycemia has a direct impact on neonatal obesity. This analysis confirms that maternal obesity is far more significant as a risk for childhood obesity than are mild elevations of glucose levels during pregnancy. This research further suggests that efforts to reduce obesity prior to pregnancy should be emphasized in clinical practice.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “‘1000-lb Sisters’ star Amy Slaton pregnant four months after weight-loss surgery,” Today.com, 12/09/20
Source: “The hidden risks of being overweight and pregnant,” Independent/ie, 05/28/15 Source: “Researchers to highlight impact of maternal glycemia on childhood obesity,” News-Medical.net, 02/03/15
Image by Dustin and Jennifer Stacey/CC BY 2.0

Thousand-Pound Sisters

Pat Hartman March 30, 2021 No Comments

Amy and Tammy Slaton, sisters from Webster, Kentucky, burst onto the media scene in 2014 by taking part in the “Chubby Bunny Challenge” — in which participants eat marshmallows one at a time and repeat “chubby bunny” with each marshmallow still in their mouth. Writer Brent Furdyk notes, “While the Chubby Bunny challenge can be funny, it’s also one of the most dangerous food challenges ever.”

Then, they became stars of a TV reality show, “1000-Lb Sisters.” Furdyk says,

Tammy explained that her motivation to have bariatric surgery and to document her weight-loss journey for TLC was to simply become healthy. She shared that she’s coped with two blood clots, pneumonia, and several medical procedures. She was even being placed on life support in the past.

Tammy also suffers from gout and, more recently, coronavirus. Among other physical manifestations, she has a prominent forehead bulge, which was feared to be a tumor but turned out to be a “fat socket,” a storage place for fat that simply had nowhere else to go.

Amy apparently started out as more of a healthy-weight child, but the girls’ caregiver, their grandmother, died when they were 10 and 11, and grief-eating, along with too much alone time while their mother worked, soon facilitated the piling on of pounds. When they signed up to do their TV show (now in its third season), Tammy weighed over 600 pounds and Amy more than 400.

Change gonna come

Both siblings became more seriously motivated by being on TV. Tammy got into swimming, and Amy became fond of dancing and long walks. For both, giving up fizzy, sugary soda was the hardest sacrifice. Amy, who is married, managed to lose enough weight to become eligible for bariatric surgery, and then became pregnant.

Her sister’s reaction was not joy, but concern, because Amy had been warned to wait for at least two years post-surgery before attempting motherhood. Nevertheless, in November of last year, little Gage, weighing only 5 pounds 6 ounces, was delivered by C-section.

Holding her son for the TV audience, Amy said, “He’s so small.” A cynical person with a cruel streak might say, “The jokes just write themselves.” While Amy is the more svelte of the two sisters, a 50-pound baby would seem small in comparison. But before objecting to that slight amount of levity, a critic should first take a look at People magazine and its silly treatment of the story, describing the first time Amy held her child as “emotional.” What a fresh take! The new mother is quoted:

Holding Gage for the first time felt surreal,” she said in a confessional. “My heart just melted. He was so perfect. His little fingers, his toes… Amy also opened up about the emotions…”

Getting a brand-new mother to say something nice about her baby is hardly a journalistic feat comparable to Woodward and Bernstein convincing Watergate witness Deep Throat to spill the beans. In what sense is any of this “confessional”? That word is associated with the reporting of one’s sins to a priest, or the admission in a courtroom to a crime. The birth of a child, while marvelous and miraculous, is nevertheless a pretty mundane event, and to sensationalize a typical mother’s reaction as a “confessional” is disrespectful, exploitative, and warped.

Meanwhile, big sister Tammy has gained weight. Now up to 665 pounds, she has been warned by her doctors that she has an 80% of dying within five years.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Untold Truth Of TLC’s 1000-Lb Sisters,” TheList.com, 01/14/20
Source: “Watch Amy Slaton Hold Son Gage for the First Time on 1000-Lb. Sisters: ‘Love Him So Much’,” People.com, 03/01/21
Source: “1000-Lb Sisters star Tammy Slaton told ‘she has a 80 percent chance of dying within FIVE YEARS’ unless she loses weight,” The-Sun.com, 01/04/21
Image by Tony Alter/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Grim Twins Have Tricks Up Their Sleeves

Pat Hartman March 29, 2021 No Comments

What we have seen so far should be enough, in any reasonable universe. But we have barely scratched the surface of the many bad outcomes caused by the partnership between obesity and the coronavirus. A lot of things can go wrong, other than direct illness, whether it is seemingly brief and mild, or drags out into “long covid,” or PASC.

We have been looking at the many indirect effects that pandemic restrictions have on people’s ability to combat obesity. Among other things, programs, meetings, and training have had to be canceled or switched to online, where a lot of people are unable to participate because of technological limitations at their end. Subjects of ongoing studies might need in-person interactions, such as blood draws, causing some to drop out.

Disruptions to the educational system, and the absence of organized sports and physical education programs, lead to obesity. Kids no longer receiving school meals are undernourished or malnourished, and both of those conditions can end up, sooner or later, turning into an obesity situation. Feeding programs can help in picking up the slack, but they can’t go all the way. A piece titled “What does junk food have to do with COVID-19 deaths?” says,

The food choices we make every day have a profound long-term impact on virtually every aspect of our well-being. And, as medical professionals track the pandemic, it is becoming increasingly clear just how much that matters in times like these.

Eating disorders specialist Crystal Karges has outlined the numerous possibilities for the development of new eating disorders resulting not from coronavirus itself, but from the culture forced on us by the pandemic. Food insecurity can nudge people into aberrant behavior like stealing and/or hiding food. They might be inspired to eat rapidly over a short period of time, or binge, when they never displayed such behavior in the past. They might eat until they vomit, or develop rigid and excessive anxiety surrounding food. They might become, Karges says, “upset or emotional if food is limited, taken away or if forced to share with others.”

Writer Kelsey Miller harks back to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, expressing dark expectations about food insecurity during the pandemic:

It demonstrates the primal wound of food deprivation and the scar it leaves on our psyches. Perhaps the most profound finding of this study is not the dramatic effects of hunger, but the fact that these effects are universal and timeless — and nothing can inoculate against them.

But worse, some researchers fear that, whether in experimental settings or in real-life disasters, the long-term effects of starvation on the descendants of survivors could be even more severe than on the starved individuals themselves. In terms of future victims of eating disorders and obesity, the epigenetic consequences could loom very large.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Starvation, Trauma, and Food Hoarding,” EatingDisorderHope.com, 05/07/15
Source: “What does junk food have to do with COVID-19 deaths?,” EHN.org, 04/28/20
Source: “What a 1944 Starvation Experiment Reveals About 2020 Food Insecurity,” Medium.com, 04/29/20
Images by Robert Kash and Gordon Milligan/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles: The Grim Twins Persist

Pat Hartman March 26, 2021 No Comments

Let’s examine further the multitude of ways in which the Grim Twins, obesity and coronavirus, conspire with each other to make so many situations worse. Every day, more experts recognize these significant elements:

Lifestyle changes including stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, closed schools, changes in daycare, stress in the home, financial complications, and increased screen time with decreased extracurricular activities have led to an increase in pediatric obesity.

We have pointed out how diet and exercise, the two main components of a fitness regime that prevents and reduces obesity, are affected. For anyone who takes seriously the rules that help to prevent the virus from spreading, opportunities for physical activity are severely curtailed. Several factors combine to interfere with the nutritional needs of humans who already were not doing too well. Loss of the ability to eat properly and exercise sufficiently are the two most glaringly obvious problems.

In regard to a study that included close to two million subjects, Dr. Liji Thomas, in an article titled “Obesity and COVID-19: Cause or effect?” elucidated the conundrum:

Among the population groups at high risk for COVID-19, those with obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes are known to be prone to more severe disease. This favors the public health policy of physical mobility restriction to protect these groups against the infection. However, as a result of these measures, the incidence of obesity may increase due to inadequate physical activity, strengthening of depressive tendencies, and lack of social interactions that support group exercise.

This could actually increase the number of those at higher risk of severe COVID-19, not including the other risks associated with obesity like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Neil Chanchlani, of the United Kingdom’s University of Exeter, also goes into detail about the consequences:

Restrictions and cancellations of child welfare visits to at-risk families can reduce visits of birth parents and children in foster care, leading to harms.

Forced isolation and economic uncertainty may lead to increases in family violence, contributing to mental and physical trauma. School cancellations may heighten food insecurity for children who depend on meal programs and increase vulnerability with the loss of school as a safe place.

The key words in that passage, that should jump right out at us, are safe, risk, welfare, trauma, harms, vulnerability, and violence. Emotional turmoil is a well-known “obesity villain” in both children and parents. There have been, and will be, separations and divorces. Sequestration and deprivation have brought domestic violence victims to emergency rooms. This is not something we like to think about or talk about, but the conditions that COVID-19 necessitates could drive people to terrible acts that will affect the rest of their lives.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Pediatric obesity in relation to COVID-19,” Parkview.com, 3/21/2021
Source: “Obesity and COVID-19: Cause or effect?,” News-Medical.net, 06/25/20
Source: “Indirect adverse effects of COVID-19 on children & youth’s mental & physical health,” All4Women.co.za, 06/25/20
Images by Phillip Sidek and bavatuesdays/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Grim Twins, Up to No Good

Pat Hartman March 25, 2021 No Comments

The Grim Twins, obesity and coronavirus, those partners in crime, wear a lot of different masks. Coronavirus can pose as a fit young person in the peak of health, who actually is infected, and has plenty of virus to share. Obesity can disguise itself as a loving adult who lets a grandchild raid the cookie jar three times a day.

The virus has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. There is its diabolical ability to form new variants, escaping even the pitiful level of policing that humankind has as yet been able to respond with.
Childhood Obesity News has been talking about “long Covid” or PASC, and the remarkable number of ways in which it manifests. We have touched on local and systemic inflammation, the interplay between COVID-19 and hormones, and many other undesirable routes the relentlessly opportunistic virus finds to get all up in our business.

On a larger scale, the disease messes with both our dietary habits and our exercise capacity. In other words, both of the two major factors involved in obesity. Oh, and our ability to breathe, which influences not only body weight, but every other aspect of life, including the ability to tolerate exercise and, literally, to live. As if all this were not enough, it drags along in its wake a whole constellation of secondary consequences that touch every area of life.

Early adapter

Dr. Neil Chanchlani, of the United Kingdom’s University of Exeter, recognized quite far back that many auxiliary problems were occurring, and likely to get worse. He listed and discussed these adverse effects:

— Delays in seeking care for non-COVID-19-related illnesses, which can lead to severe illness and even death
— Widespread delays or omissions of routine childhood vaccinations, which can threaten herd immunity
— Missed detection of delayed development milestones, which are usually identified during routine child health checks

Dr. Chanchlani also went deep into the pandemic-related factors that affect social and mental health, such as inadequate housing, food insecurity, and financial distress. School cancellations of course affect the nutritional fate of children. Forced isolation can be very stressful, either in the truest sense of one person alone, or being boxed in with too many others, or others with repellent habits and personalities. (All these difficulties have also been characterized here as prominent obesity villains.)

He also mentions problems that may affect relatively few, but affect them deeply. Children who have come to the attention of the child protection authorities, or who have already been removed to foster homes, are supposed to have a close eye kept on them, which is not able to happen in the chaotic and restrictive plague environment. This one is especially painful:

Reductions in support for children with additional healthcare needs, such as those with developmental delays, can lead to delayed diagnosis and support.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Indirect adverse effects of COVID-19 on children & youth’s mental & physical health,” All4Women.co.za, 06/25/20
Images by in hiatus and Izzie Button/CC BY 2.0

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