Plump Children -- Obese Adults -- Dr. Atkins

Plump Americans -- Dr. Atkins

You think Americans are plump now? Wait till the next generation arrives. For many American children middle-age bulge begins at age 10.

Health professionals—well aware that overweight adults are at increased risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes and even certain kinds of cancer—are beside themselves over this trend. Already we see kids with the so-called adult-onset form of diabetes. What will happen if the diseases we usually see only later in life begin to appear 15 or 20 years sooner in the life cycle? We may be about to find out. We're seeing the crest of a statistical wave that terrifies me.

In 1974, 4 percent of children and 6 percent of adolescents were overweight. By 1994, 10.5 percent of adolescents, 11.3 percent of children aged 6 through 11 and 7.2 percent of kids aged 2 through 5 were overweight, according to the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES). In the most recently released NHANES reports, covering the period of 1999-2000, these already appalling figures have climbed even higher. Today we are looking at figures of 15.5, 15.3 and 10.4 percent, respectively, in each age category. This is a hideously grim increase over a relatively short time period and dwarfs the increase in overweight adults. Our children are growing outward in front of our eyes.

Why is this happening?
The physical fitness advocates will target the extraordinary proliferation of inactivity in an age group that we used to think could never sit still. They certainly have a point. Our kids spend hours in front of the tube or its kissing cousin, the computer. Meanwhile, hard-pressed school budgets cut back or eliminate phys ed programs. Finally, many parents no longer allow their young ones to play outdoors without supervision.

The combined result is that frequency of exercise is not only down—it's fallen off the charts! For many a youngster, the big athletic event is trundling from homeroom to the school bus. You might call us the anti-exercise society. Elevators take us up, automobiles take us horizontally and electronic entertainment takes us nowhere. But this trend is only part of the answer. Of equal significance is diet.

If energy burn-off is down, what’s happening at the energy intake end? Medical researchers are finding out. Consider the implications of just two diet-related research studies. One of them, the Nationwide Food Consumption Survey, measured the food intake of Americans of all ages. It reported a large increase in total energy from salty snacks, soft drinks and pizza and a large decrease in energy from milk, beef and pork. This trend was tracked from 1977 to 1996. You're not sincerely surprised that the junk food culture is crushing protein intake, are you?

My second piece of evidence is a study done at the Boston Children's Hospital by Dr. David Ludwig. He tracked 11- and 12-year-old children in Massachusetts over a two-year period and found that an additional soft drink a day gave a child a 60 percent greater chance of becoming obese. Now, the total American consumption of soft drinks has quadrupled over the past 50 years. But the kids are bent on bettering that tortoise-like progression. In the past 10 years, soft drink consumption has almost doubled among children in this country. This means that the average American teen takes in 15 to 20 teaspoons of sugar each day just from soda and other sugar-laden packaged beverages! Try piling that much sugar on a plate, and then imagine the “good” things it's doing to our (not so) little darlings.

How I wish that these sugary liquids were the quintessence of the problem. Sadly, they are only one course in a large meal. We live in a food culture of highly refined carbohydrates—snack foods high in white flour and other milled grains, usually in combination with sugar, corn syrup and all the other names under which sugar masquerades. Tasty, yes. Convenient, yes. Addictive, yes. And, in sufficient quantities, little short of poisonous. People get fat and sick when they eat this way. We were born with bodies adapted to meat, fish, fowl, nuts, vegetables and fruit—what in another article I called “the caveman diet.” Yet parents read with confusion about the government food pyramid that touts grains (and, by extension, the junk foods made from them) as the basis of a healthy diet. Moreover, when they send their children off to school, not infrequently lunch means pizza, supplemented by vending machines ready to spew forth candy, soda and potato chips. Mm, mm, good. And profitable.

If it’s any comfort, we Americans are not alone. The British, whose diet is similar to and possibly even worse than ours, released a study by the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health last year reporting that two-thirds of preschool British children eat a diet largely consisting of white bread, French fries and sweets. As a result, rickets, a bone disease caused by nutritional deficiency and epidemic in industrial slums 100 years ago, is staging a comeback.

Now, as the childhood obesity epidemic is dawning darkly, I suggest a declaration of diet emergency. We cannot go on this way. Our ultra-refined food is the ultimate refinement of absurdity. Where is our culinary conscience? Let's give those growing bodies chicken and fish, salad greens and vegetables, a touch of grains, a handful of nuts and a ripe fruit. Let's feed our offspring as if we loved them. Then they might have a fighting chance at a long and healthy life.

This is the Karl Loren Happiness On Line Web Site Karl Promises To Answer Any Personal Message, Personally.