Snacks Make Up 27% of Kids Calories

March 2, 2010

Reuters

Children snack so often that they are “moving toward constant eating,” Carmen Piernas and Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina reported.

More than 27 percent of calories that American kids take in come from snacks, Piernas and Popkin reported in the journal Health Affairs. The researchers defined snacks as food eaten outside regular meals.

The studies will help fuel President Barack Obama’s initiative to fight obesity in childhood, something Obama’s wife, first lady Michelle Obama, notes could drive up already soaring U.S. healthcare costs.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote a commentary calling for taxes on sugary drinks and junk food, zoning restrictions on fast-food outlets around schools and bans on advertising unhealthy food to children.

“Government at national, state, and local levels, spearheaded by public health agencies, must take action,” he wrote.

Piernas and Popkin looked at data on 31,337 children aged 2 to 18 from four different federal surveys on food and eating.

“Childhood snacking trends are moving toward three snacks per day, and more than 27 percent of children’s daily calories are coming from snacks. The largest increases have been in salty snacks and candy. Desserts and sweetened beverages remain the major sources of calories from snacks,” they wrote.

“Children increased their caloric intake by 113 calories per day from 1977 to 2006,” they added.

CONSTANT EATING

“This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating.”

In a second study in the journal, Christina Bethell of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and colleagues analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health to find the rate of obesity for children 10 to 17 rose from 14.8 percent in 2003 to 16.4 percent in 2007.

The percentage of children who are overweight stayed at around 15 percent, they found.

“While combined overweight and obesity rates appear to be leveling off, our findings suggest a possible increase in the severity of the national childhood obesity epidemic,” Bethell said in a statement.

Parents, educators and policymakers all hold responsibility for this, Michelle Obama told the School Nutrition Association conference in Washington on Monday.

“Our kids didn’t do this to themselves,” Obama said.

“From fast food, to vending machines packed with chips and candy, to a la carte lines, we tempt our kids with all kinds of unhealthy choices every day.”

Other studies have shown that obese children are more likely to stay obese as adults, and they develop chronic conditions at younger ages, burdening the healthcare system.

“You see kids who are at higher risk of conditions like diabetes, and cancer, and heart disease — conditions that cost billions of dollars a year to treat,” Michelle Obama said.

The administration has launched an initiative to tackle the issue by improving nutritional standards, getting food companies to voluntarily improve nutrition standards, help kids exercise more and educating parents.

The effects extend beyond health. Bethell’s study found that overweight or obese children were 32 percent more likely to have to repeat a grade in school and 59 percent more likely than normal weight kids to have missed more than two weeks of school.

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Premature Death Could Await Obese Kids

February 10th, 2010

NY Times

Roni Caryn Rabin

A rare study that tracked thousands of children through adulthood found the heaviest youngsters were more than twice as likely as the thinnest to die prematurely, before age 55, of illness or a self-inflicted injury.

Youngsters with a condition called pre-diabetes were at almost double the risk of dying before 55, and those with high blood pressure were at some increased risk. But obesity was the factor most closely associated with an early death, researchers said.

The study, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data gathered from Pima and Tohono O’odham Indians, whose rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes soared decades before weight problems became widespread among other Americans. It is one of the largest studies to have tracked children for several decades after detailed information on weight and risk factors like high cholesterol were gathered.

“This suggests,” said Helen C. Looker, senior author of the paper and assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, “that obesity in children, even prepubescent children, may have very serious long-term health effects through midlife — that there is something serious being set in motion by obesity at early ages.” Dr. Looker added, “We all expect to get beyond 55 these days.”

Nearly one in three American children is now considered to be either overweight or obese, and this week, the first lady, Michelle Obama, kicked off a campaign intended to end childhood obesity.

The new study analyzed data gathered about 4,857 nondiabetic American Indian children born between 1945 and 1984, when the children were 11 years old on average, and assessed the extent to which body mass index, glucose tolerance, blood pressure and total cholesterol levels predicted premature death.

By 2003, 559 participants had died, including 166 who died of causes other than accidents and homicides, like cardiovascular disease, infections, cancer, diabetes, alcohol poisoning or drug overdose and a large number who died of alcoholic liver disease, which the study’s authors suggested might be exacerbated by diabetes.

Adults who had the highest body mass index scores as children were 2.3 times as likely to have died early as those with the lowest scores, and those with the highest glucose levels were 73 percent as likely to have died prematurely.

“This really points a finger at impaired glucose tolerance, or pre-diabetes, in ways we have not seen before,” said Edward W. Gregg, who is with the diabetes branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and wrote an editorial accompanying the article. “We’ve been aware that pre-diabetes in adults is related to a lot of adverse outcomes, but the relationship in youth has not been as clear. There are not as many long-term studies to document a risk factor like pre-diabetes in youth all the way to adult outcomes.”

The study found that high blood pressure in childhood was only a weak predictor of early death and high cholesterol was not associated with premature death, but experts suggested those factors were easier to control with medication.

And though the American Indian community is not representative of the nation’s population as a whole, Dr. Gregg said its experience was instructive because “they’ve tended to be just a decade or two ahead of the rest of the U.S. population” in obesity.

“The message here is that if you take your kid to the doctor and the doctor says, ‘Well, their blood pressure is O.K., their cholesterol is O.K. and their sugar’s O.K..,’ the kid who’s obese still warrants our attention,” said Dr. Peter F. Belamarich, chief of specialty medicine at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx.

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Kevin is proof that one person CAN make a difference…

Kevin is fearless and authentic, and those qualities shine through on every broadcast. I love the show because I can listen to it with my kids and because his approach is lighthearted, he educates them without scaring. He inspires me to be all that I can be, to reach for what I want and to improve on all aspects of my life. Kevin’s show is proof that one person can make a difference! If we all had one ounce of his courage and tenacity, the world would be a better place.

Amanda Gentilcore
Clarence, NY

UK.gov Uses Booze To Lure London Kids Into ID Scheme

January 26, 2010

The Register

by John Oates

Young people in London are getting the chance to get their hands on an ID card, the lucky so-and-sos.

The next stage of the Home Office’s attempts to get the cards accepted is to target those privacy-disregarding, Facebook-obsessed youths in the capital. People aged between 16 and 24 years old who hold a current or recently expired passport can apply for a card from 8 February.

Using the same lines as in Manchester, where the pilot was started, young people are told the card will help them buy booze, cigarettes, mucky movies, travel to Europe and even open a bank account.

Of course there are other ways to prove you are old enough to buy booze without handing over £30, all your personal details and a promise to always keep them up-to-date.

But the Home Office is today blaming partying youths for wantonly throwing their passports around while out drinking. Half of all passports belong to people under 30, we are told, and “a tenth of those are lost by people using them as ID on a night out.” That works out at 15,000 lost passports a year, according to a Home Office spokesman.

Here’s hoping London youths have more luck using the cards than recent travellers, who were prevented from boarding ferries and planes because their card was not considered good enough ID.

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Weight Scale for Plates to Combat Child Obesity

January 7, 2010

Yahoo News

A new device aimed at discouraging eaters from bolting their food is a useful tool in combatting childhood obesity, according to a study published online on Wednesday by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Doctors carried out an 18-month assessment of a small computer-linked scale called a Mandometer, which has been developed by scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

The gadget entails an electronic scale which sits underneath the diner’s plate, weighing the remaining food as the meal is consumed.

Sitting next to it, on the table, is a small screen which shows a graph indicating the rate at which the food is being eaten. This line is matched against an ideal graph for consumption, as programmed by a food therapist.

Too much deviation from the “ideal” graph prompts the computer to make a spoken request for the eater to slow down. The idea is to train overweight people to eat less and more slowly, thus helping them to feel satiated.

Researchers at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children and the University of Bristol in western England carried out a test among 106 patients aged between nine and 17 years.

All were clinically obese, meaning they had a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more. BMI is determined by one’s weight in kilos divided by one’s height, in metres, squared.

Some of the volunteers were trained on using the Mandometer, while the others were given standard anti-obesity care. Both groups were encouraged to raise their levels of physical exercise to 60 minutes a day and follow a healthy diet.

A year later, the Mandometer group had fallen 2.1 points in BMI on average, around triple that of counterparts in the “standard care” group. This improvement was maintained when the investigators carried out a follow-up test at the 18-month mark.

Portion sizes among the Mandometer group were also somewhat smaller by the end of the study, falling by 45 grammes (one and a half ounces). The volunteers’ speed of eating had reduced by 11 percent, whereas it accelerated by four percent in the other group.

Levels of “good cholesterol” were also much better in the Mandometer group.

The authors, led by Julian Hamilton-Shield, say the Mandometer is a “useful adjunct” in treating obesity among adolescents, a health area where the options outside the use of drugs are few, and call for further tests.

They point out, though, that Mandometer was not a “stand-alone” device in the experiment, as it was used hand-in-hand with education about nutrition and encouragement to do exercise.

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‘Good Germs’ Protecting Kids from Disease

December 22, 2009

NaturalNews

By S. L. Baker

Gone are the days when play time for kids often meant getting dirty making mud “pies”, splashing in mud puddles and creeks, and climbing trees — and when children washed their hands, mostly just before a meal, it was with plain soap and water. Modern day parents often take pride in keeping their little ones squeaky clean and as germ-free as possible, dousing them with antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizers. But new Northwestern University research suggests that normal exposure to everyday germs is a natural way to prevent diseases in adulthood.

The study, published in the December 9th edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, is the first to investigate whether microbial exposures early in life affect inflammatory processes related to diseases in adulthood. Remarkably, the Northwestern study suggests exposure to infectious microbes in childhood may actually protect youngsters from developing serious illnesses, including cardiovascular diseases, when they grow into adults.

“Contrary to assumptions related to earlier studies, our research suggests that ultra-clean, ultra-hygienic environments early in life may contribute to higher levels of inflammation as an adult, which in turn increases risks for a wide range of diseases,” Thomas McDade, lead author of the study, said in a statement to the media. McDade is associate professor of anthropology in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

He added that humans have only recently lived in super clean environments and it could well be time to put down the antibacterial soap. That’s because the new research suggests that inflammatory systems need a reasonably high level of exposure to common everyday germs and other microbes to develop and work properly in the body.

“In other words, inflammatory networks may need the same type of microbial exposures early in life that have been part of the human environment for all of our evolutionary history to function optimally in adulthood,” stated McDade.

The Northwestern University researchers specifically studied how environments early in life might affect production of C-reactive protein (CRP), a protein that rises in the blood due to inflammation, in adulthood. Research concerning CRP, which is an important part of the immune system’s fight against infection, has primarily focused on the protein as a possible predictor of heart disease. Scientists previously have mostly conducted CRP research in affluent settings, including the U.S., where there are relatively low levels of infectious diseases.

McDade and colleagues were interested in what CRP production looks like in the Philippines where residents have with a high level of infectious diseases in early childhood compared to Western countries. However, compared to Western countries, the people of the Philippines have relatively low rates of obesity (which is associated with CRP) and cardiovascular diseases.

How the research was conducted
The research team worked with data from a longitudinal study of Filipinos which began in the 1980s with 3,327 Filipino mothers in their third trimester of pregnancy. The mothers were interviewed about breast feeding and care giving and their households were assessed for socioeconomic levels, hygiene (including whether homes included domestic animals) and how many people lived in the home.

Researchers also visited with the mothers after their babies were born and then every two months for the first two years of the children’s lives. From that point on, the researchers followed up with the children every four or five years until the research subjects were approximately 22 years of age. During this entire period, records were kept on the children documenting their height and weight and any infectious diseases they contracted.

Blood tests revealed Filipino participants in their early 20s had CRP concentrations on average of .2 milligrams per liter — that’s about five to seven times lower than the average CRP levels for Americans of the same age.

“In the U.S we have this idea that we need to protect infants and children from microbes and pathogens at all possible costs,” McDade concluded. “But we may be depriving developing immune networks of important environmental input needed to guide their function throughout childhood and into adulthood. Without this input, our research suggests, inflammation may be more likely to be poorly regulated and result in inflammatory responses that are overblown or more difficult to turn off once things get started.”

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Increase In Nearsightedness Due to Texting Fad

December 15, 2009

Bloomberg.com

By Ellen Gibson

The rate of nearsightedness in the U.S. increased 66 percent since the 1970s, according to a study that researchers say suggests parents should limit the hours kids spend texting and Web-surfing.

The prevalence of myopia rose to 41 percent in a survey done from 1999 to 2004 from 25 percent in a study completed from 1971 to 1972, according to research by the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

It costs $3.8 billion a year to treat poor distance vision, a tab that rises by $1 billion for every 12 percent increase in the rate of nearsightedness, the study said. The likely cause is less outdoor time and more activities requiring close-up viewing such as text-messaging, playing hand-held video games and Web surfing, said the study’s lead author, Susan Vitale.

“Kids these days are spending less time at recess and play,” said David Friedman, a professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore who wasn’t involved in the study. “That lack of outdoor time may be taking its toll. Kids like to be outside, so get them outside to play.”

People with nearsightedness, or myopia, can see clearly close up, but objects in the distance appear blurred. That’s because an elongated eyeball or too-curved cornea causes light to focus in front of the retina, instead of on it.

“It’s an easy disease to treat, but it ends up costing a lot,” Vitale said. The condition is corrected with eyeglasses, contact lenses, or surgery, she said.

Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest health products company, generated $2.5 billion from vision products such as Acuvue contact lenses last year, more than double sales of $1.17 billion in 2002.

The study, published today in the Archives of Ophthalmology, analyzed data on vision-impairment gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics, based in Hyattsville, Maryland. Researchers gathered vision statistics on people ages 12 to 54. One set of data was collected from 1971 to 1972 on 5,282 people, while a second sample was gathered from 1999 to 2004 on 9,609 individuals.

An increase in activities eye doctors call “near work” such as reading, Web surfing, or other close-up exercises can make the eye shape change and spur nearsightedness over time, said Friedman.

“If you’re viewing everything up close, your eyes get a messenger, or growth factor, to grow longer,” Friedman said. “It’s called ‘accommodation’.”

Outdoor Time

Time spent outdoors, where the eye focuses on the far horizon, reverses that message, Friedman said. The balance between near- and far-focused vision is most important in childhood, he said, because the eye reaches its maximum length in the teen years.

While myopia is fairly easy to correct, this study raises real public-health concerns, Vitale said. Many people go untreated and their work or school performance suffers.

Myopia can lead to more severe eye conditions, such as blindness, said Friedman.

Poor vision “negatively affects people’s daily lives,” said Lisa Jones-Jordan, a research associate professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It can impact job performance, cause headaches, and prevent school kids from functioning at the proper level.”

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Sugar and Salt Weigh Down Healthy Snacks for Kids

November 17, 2009

The Guardian

Supposedly healthy snacks that are popular in children’s lunchboxes, such as cereal bars and fruit drinks, are laden with sugar, a consumer group has warned.

Which? analysed the nutritional content of a range of items targeted by leading manufacturers at children’s lunchboxes and found that a combination of the most sugary food and drinks could yield the equivalent of 12 teaspoonfuls of sugar in one meal.

The report said that of the numerous such products on supermarket shelves, “many declare that they don’t contain additives, but don’t mention they’re also full of salt or sugar – giving the impression they’re healthier than they are”.

Among those singled out is Robinsons Fruit Shoot orange juice drink, with each 200ml bottle containing 23g of sugar – the equivalent of almost five teaspoonfuls.

The report’s analysis also shows that Kellogg’s Frosties Cereal and Milk bars are made up of seven different sugars, which means the 25g bar is almost a third (8g) sugar. The company’s website says: “Fortified with vitamins, iron and calcium, now you can give your kids a great tasting snack that you can be sure won’t come back from school in the lunchbox!”

Munch Bunch Double Up fromage frais contains more than two teaspoons (12.4g) of sugar, but only 2.25g of fruit puree.

Among those high in salt is a pack of Dairylea Lunchables Ham ‘n’ Cheese crackers, which contains 1.8g of salt – more than half the government’s recommended daily allowance of 3g for a four- to six-year-old child.

Which? points out that Dairylea promotes the fact that this product contains half of a child’s recommended daily calcium intake. However, it still remains high in fat and saturated fat.

To help families choose healthier food, Which? is calling for more robust rules on when products can make health and nutrition claims. It says this would stop manufacturers making items that contain high amounts of sugar, fat and salt appear healthier than they are.

Martyn Hocking, editor of Which? magazine, said: “Parents should be able to pick out healthy products for their kids’ lunchboxes, but what you see isn’t always what you get. Some products give the impression of being healthy, but are full of salt and sugar.”

He added: “The best way to beat the lunchbox baddies is by checking the nutrition and ingredient information. We’d also like to see the rules on health and nutrition claims made tougher, so there’s less confusion on the supermarket shelves.”

Britvic, which manufacturers Robinsons Fruit Shoots, said all its products provided clear nutritional information on packs. A spokesman said: “85% of all Fruit Shoot purchased is low-sugar, with less than 2.4g of sugar per 200ml. Fruit Shoot offers a range of choices to suit a variety of needs, including Fruit Shoot H2O – a low-calorie flavoured water – and Fruit Shoot 100% Pure Juice that counts as one of the recommended five-a-day.”

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For Kids – Medicate Now, Psychiatric Problems Later

November 17, 2009

Natural News

By S. L. Baker

(NaturalNews) There’s nothing new about the fact prescription drugs come loaded with possible side effects ranging from the mild to the life-threatening. However, exactly what those side effects are isn’t always clear until widely taken medications have been used for years on end. Examples previously reported in NaturalNews include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac raising the risk of sudden death in otherwise healthy women (http://www.naturalnews.com/025811.html) and prescription sleeping pills upping the rate of suicides in the elderly (http://www.naturalnews.com/027375_s).

Now comes worrisome research which associates commonly prescribed drugs with behavioral and psychiatric disorders. The new study was presented by scientists from Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) in Washington, D. C., at the 39th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in Chicago in October.

Other researchers, including GUMC neuroscientists, have shown in previous studies that many of these medications actually cause brain cells to die when the drugs are given to immature animal models. Because the regions of the brain where this drug-induced death of neurons takes place are crucial to the regulation of mood, thinking ability and movement, GUMC scientists decided to investigate whether behavior was affected by the drugs.

Working with infant rats in the lab, GUMC scientists tested medications that are frequently prescribed to treat epilepsy, pain and mood disorders in humans — including children. By using behavioral tests on the animals when the rats reached adulthood, the researchers documented that the drugs did indeed cause behavioral abnormalities later in life.

What’s more, the abnormalities the scientists found didn’t only occur in the drugs that were previously known to cause the death of brain cells. Other frequently prescribed drugs not known to damage neurons also caused the behavioral problems. “That is of particular concern because some of the drugs may predispose to psychiatric disorders later in life,” lead author Patrick Forcelli, a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at GUMC, said in a statement to the media.
So what drugs, specifically, were tested? Neither the GUMC press office nor the Society for Neuroscience web site has posted that information publicly. However, drugs that are commonly prescribed for epilepsy include carbamazepine, valproate, lamotrigine, oxcarbazepine, phenytoin, clonazepam, phenobarbital, and primidone. Narcotics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are the most frequently prescribed for pain and SSRIs are often used for mood disorders.

The new research raises several important issues. Not only does it demonstrate that commonly used drugs may contribute to or cause psychiatric problems down the road, but the study also shows how much is yet to be learned about how specific drugs impact the human body. And while medications can help protect the lives and improve the quality of life in people with epilepsy by controlling seizures, efforts need to be stepped up to find the safest possible treatments for these patients.

In the press statement, Dr. Forcelli said his research team did identify some specific drugs that did not seem to cause long-term behavior problems. He stated that additional research is necessary to guide physicians to better select drugs to treat epilepsy, mood disorders or pain in infants and pregnant women.

Editor’s note: NaturalNews is opposed to the use of animals in medical experiments that expose them to harm. We present these findings in protest of the way in which they were acquired.

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Childhood Obesity Linked to Convenient Stores

October 13, 2009

NBC Los Angeles

Convenience stores may be just that, an easy, fast place to shop. But now, a new study indicates that kids with easy access to convenience stores may be paying for it with a weight gain.

It may not surprise you to hear that teenagers like to buy fattening junk food in convenience stores. But, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics, researchers at Temple University surveyed more than 800 kids outside urban convenience stores both before and after school. And they found, perhaps not surprisingly, that most of them buy lots of high calorie, low nutrition foods like chips and candy.

The researchers suggest that in future efforts to fight teenage obesity, more attention should be paid to how close convenience stores are to schools.

And, the Los Angeles Times reports that, citing such studies, activists in South Los Angeles want to limit the development of convenience stores there.

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