Reply to Noticing very chunky young kids

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Noticing very chunky young kids "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In the same boat OP. We don’t withhold much of anything, they get a treat after dinner, and they have very low BMI. I don’t understand how children can become so overweight. It’s tragic and the parents should have to attend mandatory child nutrition classes.  [/quote]

I cook from scratch, don’t stock junk food but don’t withhold healthy food, have occasional treats, etc etc, and I have one 15th %ile kid who eats like a bird and one 90th %ile kid who will have thirds of chicken and rice and salad. It’s complicated. [/quote]

What is complicated about this?? First off, because your kid is 90th percentile doesn’t mean he has high BMI, it’s how his weight is distributed relative to height. If he has high BMI, he is eating too much and you are responsible for making sure he cools it on the thirds or gets more exercise. Calories in calories out - IT IS NOT COMPLICATED FOR 8 YEAR OLDS[/quote]

I think many parents don’t understand BMI vs. weight percentile.  My teen’s weight percentile is 99% but his BMI is under 20 (and 50th percentile for kids BMI).  Because he’s tall - so it makes sense that he’s relatively heavy.

And he also eats a ton compared to his younger siblings, because he NEEDS to eat a ton to support his current size and continued growth.  His little sister doesn’t need to eat as much, and if I fed her exact same food in the exact same quantities as him, of course she’d get chunky.  But I wouldn’t scratch my head and tell everyone “well I feed both of my kids the same and one is fat and one is thin!  This is so darn complicated!”[/quote]

DP, and I hate to break it to you, but it is in fact complicated.[/quote]

I’m sorry, I guess I must be dense.  Can you break it down for me further, please?  What exactly is complicated about the concept of two entirely different people having two entirely different caloric needs?[/quote]

Dense isn't the word I would have chosen, but your moral certitude could use a little examination. Here's a little tidbit, with the full article linked below.

"In the 2010s, as family doctors and school nurses across the country were instructing larger children to “eat less and exercise more,” clinicians and scientists who specialized in obesity were beginning to understand the phenomenon in a different way. They knew from seeing kids in the clinic that some of them couldn’t lose weight or maintain weight loss no matter how hard they tried. As far back as the early aughts, university hospitals had been performing bariatric surgeries on a small number of these children who fell into an obesity category the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labels “severe.” It was, to a large degree, the study of post-bariatric patients that led doctors to see obesity not as a matter of simple arithmetic but as a “pathophysiological disorder” of the signals among a body’s gut, organs, hormones, fat tissue, and brain. Not all bariatric patients were able to maintain a lower weight, but for those who did, it seemed the operation had reduced their appetite — not only by limiting how much they could eat but also by rewiring their internal system. This new understanding, coupled with a goal of dispelling the belief that an inability to lose weight reflects a failure of will, led the American Medical Association to establish obesity as a disease in 2013.

But insight into obesity’s internal mechanisms did little to shed light on its prevalence. Why were there so many more kids with obesity? And why were so many of them so much more obese? In 2008, 36.5 percent of children ages 2 to 19 were overweight or obese; by 2018, that percentage was 41.5. Prevalence was climbing in children of every racial group, with the highest growth among Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. By the end of 2020, children who were already obese were gaining weight at an accelerated rate. Pediatricians use growth charts to measure how a child’s size compares with the norm, and as the obesity epidemic escalated, they found themselves plotting more and more patients at the chart’s upper reaches, often above the 95th percentile of BMI, and sometimes off the grid entirely. When a phenomenon becomes so widespread, scientists look for causes beyond individuals and to their environment. The increase in obesity obviously correlated with the food kids ate — addictive, palatable, accessible at all hours — and their lack of physical activity: the phones, yes, but also reduced recess hours, unsafe neighborhoods, and lockdowns. Poverty and hunger correlate with obesity, as do other traumatic childhood experiences such as the death of a parent or sexual abuse. The frontier of obesity research lies here, in understanding how these external factors, as pervasive and variable as the weather, interact with each individual body — disrupting the metabolism, activating genes, or miscuing hunger signals — to produce the condition physicians call “obesity.”

A propensity for obesity is encoded in certain people’s genes. More than 70 genes correlated with obesity are already known, though the presence or absence of an obesity gene does not forecast a child’s future body shape. Nevertheless, the biggest known predictor of whether a child will develop obesity is if her parents have it; there is a 40 percent likelihood with one parent and an 80 percent likelihood with two. The question is which environmental factors (and in which combinations and at what levels of intensity) turn the genes “on.” Then, further into the realm of unknowns: What are the triggers for obesity beyond known genetic predispositions? Toxins in food may modify our DNA, an epigenetic disruption that can be passed to the next generation. Changes in an individual’s gut bacteria, caused by the biochemical composition of food, may have the downstream effect of altering metabolism. “There are many, many, many associations” between the environment and the body that can produce obesity, says Sarah Armstrong, a professor of pediatrics and an obesity specialist at Duke, “but no one smoking gun.”

https://www.thecut.com/article/weight-loss-drugs-ozempic-kids-childhood-obesity.html[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics