Obesity Trends and Genes

Obesity Trends and Genes
by
Charles R. Attwood, M.D., F.A.A.P.

The obesity trend among baby boomers skyrocketed during the closing years
of the 20th century. In order to understand this trend, it is necessary to
understand that adults do not suddenly become obese. Like most other health
risks, obesity usually has its beginnings during childhood, when life-long
eating patterns and physical activity habits are established. Parents'
lifestyles strongly influence those of their children--who later as adults
continue this vicious cycle.

Benji had been coming to our clinic for almost 3 months, always with his
aunt, because his mother and father both worked during my office hours. At
age 10, he tipped the scales at 140 pounds, approximately double his ideal
weight. We learned early in our sessions that he spent 3 hours before the
TV each day after school, before his parents got home. His first task,
after turning on the TV, was finding a snack -- usually there were cookies,
candy, or left-over desserts in the house. After dinner, often brought home
by his parents from a fast-food restaurant, he did his homework and played
video games before bedtime.

Like his parents, breakfast usually consisted of sweet rolls or a donut,
since everyone was in a hurry to leave the house and get to work and
school. By lunch time Benji was famished when he got to the school lunch
cafeteria. He grabbed french fries and either a hamburger or hot dog, a
glass of milk, and whatever dessert he could find. He often traded for and
ate his friends' desserts. After school this cycle was repeated. Benji's
daily diet is usually rounded out by several high-fat snacks between meals.

Unusual? No, actually Benji's lifestyle is very typical of children his age
in America and many other Western nations. A recent report by the Center
for Disease Control and Prevention, not unexpectedly, showed that the
incidence of severe obesity among children of Benji's age has doubled since
1965. The reason? Inactivity and a diet too high in fat and calories. It's
usually a family pattern -- children tend to adopt the eating and activity
habits of their parents -- but not an inborn genetic trait. If one parent
is overweight, the chances of a child having a weight problem is 40
percent. If both parents are overweight, the child's chances of gaining
excessive weight increases to 80 percent. When we finally met Benji's
parents,both, as we had predicted, were extremely heavy. Their cavalier
attitude about his weight was best expressed by his mother: "We're not
really worried;" she said, "he'll probably slim down as he gets older; his
cousins did."

Unfortunately, the odds are overwhelming that Benji will, without dietary
and exercise intervention, become an overweight adult. Furthermore,
slimming down later may not prevent some of the diseases associated with
obesity, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer. A recent study at Tufts
University showed that an overweight adolescent will have a increased death
rate -- two times greater -- from these diseases before age 70, even if the
weight is lost as a young adult. This health risk is never completely
abolished. Why should this be the case? One likely reason: excess numbers
of fat cells are created during infancy and again during the years around
adolescence. These are permanent for the rest of a child's life, always
ready to serve for body fat storage. These unfortunate individuals may
maintain an excessively high percentage of body fat, regardless of their
weight.

Other health risk-factors, such as high blood pressure and elevated
cholesterol levels may be silent and unrecognized by parents and peers, but
obesity is obvious -- the earliest visible sign of ills-to-come. It should
never be ignored. A plant-based diet (see my 4 stages below) and daily
physical activity are the necessary corrective measures. Simply reducing
the passive time spent in front of a TV screen is an important first step
-- surveys show that a typical child of Benji's age in America spends 5
hours a day either watching TV, using a personal computer, or playing video
games. Furthermore, the proportion of food commercials for high-fat
products (primarily snacks) on children's programs have, in recent years,
increased to 41 percent -- up from 16 percent in 1990. High-fat snacks now
account for 20 percent of their daily calories, the highest snack-calorie
consumption in the world. The French, for example, get about 7 percent of
calories from snacks. But restricting calories alone -- even fat-calories
-- may not help much. Whereas, reducing dietary fat-calories works very
well in correcting elevated cholesterol levels, children need both this and
physical activity to control excessive weight.

A $50 billion diet industry in the United States, unwisely bases its
programs primarily on caloric restriction; and its failure rate is high. We
learned from the China Health Study that the rural Chinese ingest 30
percent more calories than Americans and obesity is rare among them. More
physical activity and a plant-based diet with little fat and animal protein
seem to be the answer to this paradox. These two factors apparently work
together to increase the "resting energy expenditure" (REE). At total rest,
or even sleep, a higher REE burns more calories per hour. It's nothing new,
no gimmicks; the human body was programmed to behave this way during the
Paleolithic period, when children and adults consumed a plant-based diet
and were necessarily active. Now, 50,000 years later, with essentially the
same genes, we can't trick mother nature.

It's Not The Genes

The common answer given by parents and most health care professionals is
disturbing. Because if they're right, nothing can be done about this
terrible health risk, which according to former Surgeon General C. Everett
Koop, is second only to smoking as a cause of premature death. "It's the
genes," they say, "our family is just that way.

So obesity is serious. But let's face it; it's due to lifestyle habits, not
genes. Children have eaten more calories and exercised less during the
television era. How long does it take for a population to undergo changes
in their genes? Thousands of years? Think about it. During the half century
between the 1946 and 1997 editions of the Spock book, the genetic pattern
of Americans couldn't have changed; yet the portion of our children who are
overweight has more than doubled.

The answer is in prevention. Simply limit television to less than 2 hours
daily, encourage regular exercise, and gradually shift them to a more
plant-based diet of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes, with
less frequent servings -- not every day -- of meat and dairy products.
Finally, let's face it. Obesity, the earliest visible sign of poor health,
is rare among vegetarian families, who are known to outlive the general
population by at least 8 years.

In 1996 the Center For Disease Control and Prevention reported that obesity
is far more common today than it was just 3O years ago. Shocking, was their
finding that, among children, those that are the most overweight have
increased by 100 percent! Aren't we eating less fat; and what about all
those selections of fat-free snacks and other foods we're buying like mad?
Well, we sometimes forget that all those fat-free foods are not necessarily
low in calories. One of my patients admitted to consuming 1,000 calories
from a package of fat-free Fig Newtons before she reached the checkout
counter of her supermarket.

Portion and serving sizes are getting larger also, not just in the
supermarket, but in fast food restaurants. Serving sizes in France, for
example, are usually much smaller than in this country. Most Europeans, in
fact, are astonished by the size of our hamburgers, pizzas, popcorn, and
soft drinks. And predictably, the rate of obesity among the French and
Europeans in general is much less than in this country, even though they
consume as much or more fat than Americans.

Lost: 22,000 Seats In Yankee Stadium!

One of the most graphic examples of increasing obesity in America is the
disappearing seats of a famous baseball park. Yankee Stadium was built
during the 1920s. It had about 82,000 seats. After remodeling during the
1970s the seating was only 59,000. During that 50 year period, between Babe
Ruth and such baseball greats as Thurman Munson, Ron Guidry, and Reggie
Jackson, the American bottom had widened from 14 inches to 19 inches.
Patrons at the Mickey Mantle restaurant in New York, where a few of the
original seats were installed, have found them to be a tight fit.

Obesity isn't entirely due to excessive dietary fat or even the serving
sizes. During the past 30 years, these haven't significantly increased. On
the other hand, physical activity has progressively decreased since the
mid-1960s. Today's children watch television an average of 5 hours a day. A
1996 report from Harvard in the Archives of Pediatrics showed that obesity
was far more common among children watching TV 5 hours daily than among
those watching less than 2 hours daily.

Let's face the facts: our creeping obesity is a result of our lifestyle:
dietary fat, calories, serving sizes, and inactivity, but not our genes.
The father's fat, the mother's fat, the child's fat, and the dog is fat.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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I hope you all like blaming me for what these two lowlife sorry excuses for
humanity are doing. Your concern is touching....

Note that this is cross posted from the Devil's Asshole to Gods eyebrows.

NR is a disease. Everything he touches is a disease.

The **** NR has dead people making posts. His dildo troll hunter
will say I did it. No matter that I have used anonymous remailers in
my life.

look at these headers:


Message-ID:
From: Leslie DiMaggio
Subject: Obesity Trends and Genes
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Obesity Trends and Genes
by
Charles R. Attwood, M.D., F.A.A.P.

NR diarrhea fushed-like it should be.

LV


Lady Veteran
- -----------------------------------
"I rode a tank and held a general's rank
when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank..."
- -Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
- ------------------------------------------------
People who hide behind anonymous remailers and
ridicule fat people are cowardly idiots with no
motive but malice.
- ---------------------------------------------




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In article ,
Lady Veteran wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I hope you all like blaming me for what these two lowlife sorry excuses for
humanity are doing. Your concern is touching....

Note that this is cross posted from the Devil's Asshole to Gods eyebrows.

NR is a disease. Everything he touches is a disease.

The **** NR has dead people making posts. His dildo troll hunter
will say I did it. No matter that I have used anonymous remailers in
my life.


Can anyone suggest some music to accompany LV's dance of denial?



look at these headers:


Message-ID:
From: Leslie DiMaggio
Subject: Obesity Trends and Genes
Newsgroups:
soc.support.fat-acceptance,alt.support.big-folks,misc.kids.health,alt.
support.diet.low-carb,alt.support.diet.weigh****chers
Organization: NAAFA
Comments: This message probably did not originate from the above
address.
It was automatically remailed by one or more anonymous mail
services.
You should NEVER trust ANY address on Usenet ANYWAYS: use PGP
!!!
Get information about complaints from the URL below
X-Remailer-Contact: http://80.65.224.85/POL/ In case my abuse
address is unreachable: It is because it has been flooded by
, please contact
Date: 29 Mar 2004 01:28:30 +0100
Lines: 157
X-Mail2News-Contact: http://80.65.224.85/
Path:
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t-for-mail
Xref: newsmst01.news.prodigy.com soc.support.fat-acceptance:248351
alt.support.big-folks:90456 misc.kids.health:136320
alt.support.diet.low-carb:751225
alt.support.diet.weigh****chers:235488

Obesity Trends and Genes
by
Charles R. Attwood, M.D., F.A.A.P.

NR diarrhea fushed-like it should be.

LV


Lady Veteran
- -----------------------------------
"I rode a tank and held a general's rank
when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank..."
- -Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
- ------------------------------------------------
People who hide behind anonymous remailers and
ridicule fat people are cowardly idiots with no
motive but malice.
- ---------------------------------------------




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On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 01:03:43 GMT, sparky-warky , wrote:

In article ,
Lady Veteran wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I hope you all like blaming me for what these two lowlife sorry excuses for
humanity are doing. Your concern is touching....

Note that this is cross posted from the Devil's Asshole to Gods eyebrows.

NR is a disease. Everything he touches is a disease.

The **** NR has dead people making posts. His dildo troll hunter
will say I did it. No matter that I have used anonymous remailers in
my life.


Can anyone suggest some music to accompany LV's dance of denial?


"I shot the Sheriff?"

Jade



look at these headers:


Message-ID:
From: Leslie DiMaggio
Subject: Obesity Trends and Genes
Newsgroups:
soc.support.fat-acceptance,alt.support.big-folks,misc.kids.health,alt.
support.diet.low-carb,alt.support.diet.weigh****chers
Organization: NAAFA
Comments: This message probably did not originate from the above
address.
It was automatically remailed by one or more anonymous mail
services.
You should NEVER trust ANY address on Usenet ANYWAYS: use PGP
!!!
Get information about complaints from the URL below
X-Remailer-Contact: http://80.65.224.85/POL/ In case my abuse
address is unreachable: It is because it has been flooded by
, please contact
Date: 29 Mar 2004 01:28:30 +0100
Lines: 157
X-Mail2News-Contact: http://80.65.224.85/
Path:
newssvr25.news.prodigy.com!newsdbm01!newsdbm01.new s.prodigy.com!newsco
n07.news.prodigy.com!newsmst01.news.prodigy.com!pr odigy.com!prodigy.co
m!pd7cy2so!pd7cy1no!shaw.ca!news.alt.net!Gilgamesh-frogadmin.yi.org!no
t-for-mail
Xref: newsmst01.news.prodigy.com soc.support.fat-acceptance:248351
alt.support.big-folks:90456 misc.kids.health:136320
alt.support.diet.low-carb:751225
alt.support.diet.weigh****chers:235488

Obesity Trends and Genes
by
Charles R. Attwood, M.D., F.A.A.P.

NR diarrhea fushed-like it should be.

LV


Lady Veteran
- -----------------------------------
"I rode a tank and held a general's rank
when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank..."
- -Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
- ------------------------------------------------
People who hide behind anonymous remailers and
ridicule fat people are cowardly idiots with no
motive but malice.
- ---------------------------------------------




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