Obesity in Children

I continue with this series on obesity by discussing a topic that is alarming: obesity in children.

I’ve talked about obesity around the world and in the U.S., and how statistics show that the obesity trends continue to increase.

It’s bad enough to see the rates increase amongst adults; it’s even worse to see them increase among children.

What this means is that we’re creating future generations of people trapped in a High Density Lifestyle.

This does not bode well in many ways. It increases the health risks for these children now, and/or when they become adults. And it increases the health care costs of society in general.

In the U.S., nearly one in three children and teens are overweight or obese. In Mississippi, which is the nation’s most obese state, 44% of children and teens are overweight or obese.

And one in four obese children in the United States has early signs of type II diabetes, which is the type of diabetes seen only in adults until recently. In fact, almost half of the children and adolescents now diagnosed with diabetes have the type II form of the disease, which is strongly linked to obesity and lack of exercise.

Things aren’t better in other countries, as I pointed out in the article on Obesity Around the World.

Even more specifically, let’s look at childhood obesity in Asia – Asians are catching up with the U.S. and Western world in their obesity statistics.

Where malaria, typhoid and malnutrition once were the major killers in Asia, millions of people are falling prey to “Western” diseases – diabetes, heart disease and strokes, all associated with obesity and sedentary lifestyles.

This dramatic, almost abrupt change in lifestyle follows centuries in which the vast majority of Asians survived on a diet of less than 2,000 calories a day derived from food grown from the soil – particularly rice.

“The number of calories consumed by Asians, historically speaking, haven’t been that high,” says Dr. Robert Keith, a professor of nutrition at Auburn University in Alabama. “Food was sparse with very little saturated fat and was derived mostly from grains, rice and vegetables.”

By modern standards, it was a bleak lifestyle, far removed from the opulent lifestyles now commonplace in burgeoning cities throughout Japan, China, Thailand and Malaysia.

Until recently, obesity and its related problems were associated almost entirely with the West, where food was cheap, fast and fatty and physical inactivity was the norm rather than the exception.

But Asians are catching up fast. As health professionals are learning, the rising tide of affluence that has followed industrialization and urbanization throughout much of Asia has been accompanied by the same problems associated with the West – skyrocketing rates of obesity coupled with plummeting levels of physical activity.

“Like the West decades ago, Asians have prospered by producing more consumer goods and attracting tourist dollars,” Keith says. “And as a result, they now have more disposable income, and their lifestyle allows them to purchase more convenient food.”

In many cases, Western food providers, particularly fast-food chains, are only happy to meet this demand.

But opulence comes with a price. More often than not, this food, while cheap, convenient and plentiful, also is loaded in saturated fat and, in most cases, sugar. As a result, in only one generation, many Asians have gone from consuming between 1,500 and 2,000 calories a day to between 2,000 and 3,000 calories. And many of these calories increasingly are being derived from milk, ice cream, cookies and soft drinks.

What this has meant is that there is rising rates of obesity not only among adults but amongst Asian children and teens. Like millions of Western children, they’re developing something health experts seldom ever saw a few decades ago – adult onset diabetes.

The World Health Organization reports that obesity among Thai children, ages 5 to 12, has risen to nearly 16 percent – a 4 percent increase from only a couple of years ago.

In Japan, where the problem isn’t as serious, obesity has risen from just under 3 percent to almost 10 percent among boys and from almost 3.5 to 8 percent among girls.

One of the factors for this increase in Asia is the wide availability of televisions, personal computers and video games. Like their counterparts in the United States, millions of Asian children are spending an increasing amount of time either watching television or playing computer games – and in the meantime, snacking on the wide array of readily available Western-style snacks.

Another factor associated with affluence, described by Asians as “malling,” also appears to be taking its toll. Like millions of their counterparts in the West, Asian children and teens are spending an increasing amount of their leisure time in malls, shopping and munching on fast food.

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Obesity Can Be Caused By Chemicals in Foods

In Tuesday’s article I discussed some of the dietary reasons for the increased rate of obesity in most countries around the world, and especially in the U.S.

I said how some of the main culprits are sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and an increased reliance of fast foods.

And in yesterday’s article, I showed you how Kellogg’s is trying to fool the public into thinking that a breakfast cereal that is laden with sugar and junk is a food that can boost your immune system.

No wonder obesity is, according to the World Health Organization, a global epidemic! With friends like these, who needs enemies!

But there’s another category of foods that can lead to weight gain and obesity – the chemicals in your food, even if those chemicals don`t contain a single calorie.

To understand this, you’ll need to realize that the liver is your primary detoxification organ. Your liver is also your primary fat-burning organ. Therefore, the more unnatural chemicals you consume on a regular basis, the more time and energy your liver needs to spend detoxifying you. But, the more your liver is consumed with the role of detoxification, the less time and energy it will have for burning fat.

For instance, it’s safe to say that pesticides are poisons: their primary purpose is to kill living organisms, and most non-organic foods are laden with pesticides.

Now, these pesticides don’t transform into non-toxic, safe entities once inside the body.  As the pesticides enter the body, the body’s defense mechanisms send signals that poisons have entered.

How does your body deal with a poison?  By attempting to neutralize it. This means your body attempts to render the poison harmless, and then remove it , generally through normal elimination channels, such as through your colon. Your colon is the primary organ used to eliminate toxins from the body, and the liver is the organ most often responsible for rendering poisons harmless.

But what happens when people eat unnatural chemicals on a regular basis?

Then the liver becomes overwhelmed with the need to detoxify all of those chemicals and poisons, and the poisons start backing up into the blood.

Your liver is also the great warehouse of the body, and so it also stores toxins and poisons that it was unable to neutralize. It does this to keep those poisons out of your bloodstream and from circulating in your body.

This can be taxing on the liver – it can be overwhelming trying to detoxify all of the chemicals being consumed on a daily basis; in addition it is trying to store all the poisons that it wasn’t able to neutralize.

Some estimates are that three fourths of the average person’s liver is used to store toxins that the liver was unable to render harmless.

No wonder that for so many people losing weight is virtually impossible: Their primary fat burning organ is overwhelmed with another task, and it’s become only half functional.

Not only will this lead to weight gain and an inability to lose weight, it can also lead to diabetes, because the liver plays a vital role in the uptake of blood glucose, and if the liver is not fully functioning, its ability to do the work it needs to do with blood glucose can be severely impaired.

And guess what? Like obesity, diabetes has reached epidemic proportions.

So what to do about it? A couple of things.

The first is to try and stop consuming chemicals in your diet on a regular basis. This generally means giving up processed foods as best as possible, and eating organic foods as much as possible. Plant-based foods, particularly vegetables, are very liver friendly.

This will prevent many new chemicals from entering your body, and is a tremendous step in the right direction. But what about those poisons already stored in your liver and circulating in your blood?  Sometimes it takes more than changing your diet to clear out the accrued chemicals residing in the liver.

That is why over the years there have been a number of natural/herbal approaches that have been developed to cleanse the liver.

Milk thistle, vitamin C, selenium, beta carotene, vitamin E, and N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC) are all powerful antioxidants which are helpful in liver detoxification.

The amino acid SAM-E plays an important role in liver health, in addition to helping with depression. Cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts and cabbage in the diet have been shown to enhance liver detoxification. Besides using them as foods, you can also juice with them.

The B vitamins, including riboflavin and niacin, also are helpful in liver detoxification.

Coffee enemas, used in Gerson Cancer Therapy, is also something that can detox the liver.