Child Obesity

Child Obesity - A Window into the Future, often, a Short Future

Does it seem to ring true? The claim, coming from extensive research done on thousands of children is that, a child who grows obese in childhood, is twice as likely as any normal child, to die by the age of 55, either through falling ill or through suicide. And not even a crazy situation like childhood diabetes or high blood pressure, can push a child close to catastrophe as much as child obesity can. If you like to read the New England Journal of Medicine, you'd see this study in a recent issue. What makes that study so compelling is that they took the trouble to pick thousands of children for their research, and to follow them for decades.

So, to have a child grow obese, isn't something that can be taken care of later. If the child is obese now it will absolutely have effects on her life expectancy and health, 40 years later, even if she pulls herself together and loses weight by then. Of course, to late-night talkshow hosts and stand-up comedians around the country, fat lazy kids have been a big source of cheap laughs for years; but it really is no laughing matter that one in three children in America falls in the overweight or obesity category if it will tell on their health decades from now. Something really serious in the body appears to get damaged by child obesity. And so, perhaps it is just as well that the first lady, Michelle Obama, is following up her campaign to get America to each more greens, with a campaign to end obesity in childhood.

The study actually took up and followed ten-year-old children who lived in Indian reservations, starting around the year 1945. They happened to pick American Indian children, because the obesity problem started out much earlier in that population than it did in the general American population. They kept following those very children until many of them began to die by the year 2000 of poor health. Plenty more were lost to alcoholism and drugs. This was not something that happened to the thin children as they grew up. Kids who suffered from child obesity, were more than twice as likely to die by 55; children with high glucose levels, were one-and-a-half times more likely to die by that age too.

How does this study help you help your child? If you take your child in to get looked over by a doctor, and he says that there isn't much to worry about, because even if there is some weight trouble in evidence, all the tests for blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels checked out okay, you know that the doctor is wrong. Child obesity isn't just bad because it makes children likely to be affected by those symptoms. Childhood obesity is just dangerous in and of itself. It may be easy to dismiss a study like this, pointing to how it was done on a different race of peoplealtogether. But they found that American Indians in their health, always seem to lead the rest of the nation by a few decades. Studying this group, always gives scientists a window into the future.