The Cause and Effect are Backwards
The woman who writes the Junkfood Science blog seems to think that eating disorders are increasing because of scientists and the media putting pressure on kids to eat healthy and look thin. I think the cause is related to the fact that the average 10 year old weighs 10 more pounds than they did in 1963 (when I was 10 actually).
Why is that? When I was 10, I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple for lunch and a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Snacks were not that common and were usually fruit. Dinner was usually prepared by mom, based on the indoctrination all good moms went through back then. She served some meat, a green vegetable, a starch and a salad. We did not have dessert every day. We did eat candy, but it was considered a big treat. The only fast food was an occasional hamburger. We discovered pizza when I was older than 10. Even then, pizza was maybe once a month. I played outside a lot, riding my bike, roller skating, and climbing trees. People did not chauffer me from event to event. I was on my own most of the day, free to roam. Kid's TV channels did not exist. The only time we got bombarded with kid commercials was on Saturday morning - the cartoon time.
Kids are fat today because they eat fast food half the time. Their houses are full of highly processed snack foods, that they can graze on all day long. They drink sodas like they were the only beverage possible. Food is constantly advertised to them as they watch their shows, all day, every day.
So, the 1963 10 year old was slim and not even thinking about their weight. Food was something Mom made for you and you ate. She made you eat the green beans. Once you ate lunch, it was 5 hours until dinner. Food was not on the agenda. It was easy to be slim. The world cooperated with you on slim.
The 2008 kids have to deal with the constant pressure from advertising and the temptations of snack food. Food is always in their face. It's no wonder they are obsessed with food and worried about their weight. Food companies want them to be obsessed. They pay advertising companies lots of money to make sure that children are obsessed. They are heavier than they should be and are worried about their weight. I am not convinced that this worrying is enough to be an "eating disorder".
It's not the scientists that are the problem. The scientists can see the problem, they just haven't come up with any great solutions. The fact that their solutions aren't they great doesn't mean its their fault. It's not clear that they are making things worse trying to counteract food advertising pressure. The scientist's behavior is caused by the fact that kids are getting fatter and less healthy - not the other way around.
I wish Sandy would also focus on the pressure from the other direction at least as much as she does on the do-gooder side. The world of eating for today's children is hardly even just what mom cooks, like it was in my day. It's TV, it's peers, it's junk food and fast food. It's a pantry full of gak. Sandy may not do that in her house, but in most 10 year old's houses, that's the reality.
posted by Mary Robinson @ 1:11 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
Great post. What you say makes a lot of sense. However, I have one thing to add: family tendencies/heredity can have a huge effect.
In my family, there's a tendency to get fat around the middle (apple-shaped) and carry 10-20 extra pounds, and get high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes.
I'm about the same age you are, and when I was 10 I was overweight - in high school, I was about 155 pounds - even though the environment in which I grew up was much like yours, Mom cooking, little TV, etc. All my siblings were overweight too, and still are.
Of all my siblings through adulthood, I managed to keep my weight relatively normal, but I was always slightly heavy. For years, my set point was 140 on a height of 5'8".
I wasn't able to get slender until discovering CRON and drastically reducing all sugar and starches like pasta, bread and potatoes (I've also cut out sat fats, and I never did eat much in the way of fast or processed foods.)
My genetic make-up just doesn't cope well with starchy carbs, I think. Without them and now practicing CR, I've become the only slender member of my family, now at 120 pounds.
You are showing your ignorance of population statistics. In that idealized 1960s you discuss, the CDC cites that 3 to 4 million people had measles every year in the US, most were children and as many as 500 died every year, and 48,000 were hospitalized. There was far more widespread hunger among the population. Children today are considerably healthier, fewer are struggling with childhood diseases and not having enough to eat. That means the POPULATION-wide stats are up, not that individual children have become enormous. There were fat and thin children found naturally among those with enough to eat back then, too. But thankfully today, there are fewer underweight children today bringing the population averages down.
Even the public schools work against health. Have you seen what gets served for lunch, or what 10-yr-olds and 15-yr-olds can buy as snacks during the school day?
I finished high school a couple yrs back. School lunch: pizza (you could hold the slice up and watch the fat from the pepperoni drip off and form a puddle on the tray), tater tots, cheeseburgers, iceberg lettuce as "salad" from time to time, canned fruit cocktail in heavy syrup as "fruit," occasionally heavily waxed tasteless mealy Red Delicious apples. Big bowls of pasta. Chili nachos. Canned green beans. White bread everywhere. Reconstituted powdered potatoes with "gravy." Tons and tons and tons of chicken nuggets and fries. Hot Pockets. Beverage: chocolate milk or whole milk.
If you didn't like the lunch item, you could buy numerous types of candy, nachos with cheez whiz sauce, curly fries with cheez whiz, hot pretzels, Doritos, soda, Gatorade, snack cakes, trans-fat-heavy packaged cookies. Now and then they might have some green bananas for sale.
Anonymous above has not realized that over a quarter to a third of schoolchildren are overweight or obese. These numbers were far lower in the 1960s. The percentage rises to as high as 50% in lower income school districts. Rates of type 2 diabetes in minors have skyrocketed. Minorities are the hardest-hit by the rise in type 2 diabetes among children. The current concern is a projected DECLINE in life expectancy (a drop of 2 to 5 years) for children due to rising rates of metabolic disorders and cardiovascular disease, along with cancer.
At my lunch table you would usually see some guy with gummi worms and a cinnamon bun for lunch, a girl with a 20 oz bottle of Dr Pepper and a bag of McDonalds, another girl only eating iceberg lettuce without dressing for weeks on end because she was afraid of getting fat, and a guy with a school lunch of chili nachos, chocolate milk, canned carrots, jello salad, and fries.
It's true that fewer children today go hungry than did in the 1960s. Sadly, though more of today's children may have full bellies, they're still malnourished.
I grew up in the 1950s-60s and most of my friends who ate school lunches would daily eat only piles of mashed potatoes, white bread rolls with butter and giant cookies. This idealized notion of how children ate in the past is nonsense, moreso are your fears of foods you believe are bad. You're getting sold by propaganda about an obesity epidemic, diabetes, etc. based on statistical shenanigans and believe everything you hear in media. One cannot argue with someone unable to think or understand science. I only hope you don't work with kids.
Re: "Propaganda about an obesity epidemic, diabetes, etc."
Wow...you're in denial. You just have to walk into any regular mall in the US and Canada, and you the majority of people you see are overweight or obese, or haven't you looked?
Why is it that we now have a magazine called Diabetic Living on the news-stands?
Anonymous,
Open your eyes and look around. It does not take a scientist to notice the rolls of excess calories hangng off most Americans. Better yet, put your head back in that hole in the ground. Its a more beautiful world that way!
My piano teacher just came back from a months's visit to her "exchange family" when she lived in the states for a year in highschool in Arizona. That was in the 60's. She came back shocked how "morbidly obese" most of Americans are.
I still have like 30 pounds to lose to be normal weight, so I am not exactly fit myself. But she looked at me and said "wow, you seem to be really thin when compared to Judy's family!". She then continued how her 10 and 8 year olds are anormously fat and don't care, neither does the family, they just keep eating the chips.
America just consumes too much, less face it. With the conformity of capitalism and the triumph of middle class comes the disturbing reality of excess. I first had a big mac when I was 14, and that was 1987, that is the date macdonalds ship showed up on our shores. I blame my adolecent trouble with food mostly to having been introduced to fastfood at that fragile age.
The average American mostly eats gak throughout his/her life and a very big population somewheres on earth is dying of hunger. Not just America, every one of us who is white and middle/upper middle class should question their relationship with food seriously, some solid ethics wouldn't hurt.
zeynep
Anonymous mentions "statistical shenanigans" without actually refuting any of the information. This figure is simple, but says enough, I think.
Trends in Obesity: All Age Groups
I don't get most of my information from the 6-o'-clock news or the paper. My familiarity with the rising presence of type 2 diabetes in young people comes from
1. academic journal articles, and
2. day-to-day experience in my parents' medical office.
It's one thing to read about shocking (but documented) increases in obesity-correlated metabolic disorders in children. It's another to see them walking in through the waiting room doors in numbers that we never, ever saw ten or twenty years ago. Some are unable to bend down to tie their own shoes. In twenty or thirty years, they may not have feet on which to put those shoes, if their blood glucose issues stay unregulated. Or they may not be able to see to tie the laces.
I do not know if you have access to academic resources, Anonymous, but PubMed is a good place for you to try a search on type 2 diabetes and children, if you'd like evidence-based science. You can also look into links between excess calorie consumption, simple carbohydrate consumption, and metabolic disorders.
You can rest easy on one point. My academic training is in physics, so I work with computers, mathematics, and lab equipment, not children, as much as I like them.
Great reads for anyone interested in why our food system is so disfunctional in the US:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen
In 1971 only 4% of 6-to-11-year-old kids were obese; by 2004, the figure had leaped to 18.8%. In the same period, the number rose from 6.1% to 17.4% in the 12-to-19-year-old group, and from 5% to 13.9% among kid’s ageing between 2 to 5. Include all overweight kids, and a whopping 32% of all American children now carry more pounds than they should. http://www.phentermine-effects.com
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