Children Left Vulnerable to Obesity Through Food Miseducation, Warns Doctor

Conservative News DailyFebruary 20, 2023

The path to childhood obesity Starts before birth and gets more complicated with each passing day. Children Be the target of Food Marketers who claim delicious and healthy fun with processed foods containing questionable or even harmful ingredients are luring you.

Parents—many victims of the same influences—may hope schools and governments will educate and protect their children, but the reality is that parents are largely on their own.

The best option is to educate our children ourselves. Children who understand what food does to their bodies—and the problems with many of the foods marketed to them—can develop a lifelong habit of healthy eating. Experts recommend that children be involved in food preparation, shopping, and preparation. This can help combat childhood obesity.

“If they develop bad habits, it’s very hard to change those when their culture reinforces them. These children are the victims of the situation,” Dr. Nadia Ali The Epoch Times. Ali is board certified for integrative and internal medicine. “We have to understand the root cause of obesity so we can treat, reverse, and prevent it.”

These root causes can be boiled down to two simple, obvious factors: (1) How children fuel their bodies and (2) how they move their bodies. However, resolving these problems is not always easy. Other factors are also important.

The gut is one of these factors. microbiome. Research has linked distortions in this collection of symbiotic microbes to obesity and metabolic syndrome. The food we eat and other factors determine what microbes we foster and whether these help or hinder our overall health.

The Cost of Childhood Obesity

Ali is on a mission reverse childhood obesity—without heaping guilt on children—by reminding people this costly killer is an epidemic we can overcome. Unfortunately, most approaches, including the new American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines that include using pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgery on children as young as 13, are bandages, Ali said. In other words, they treat the symptoms of obesity, but not the cause.

That’s an unfortunate and costly oversight. Combined direct and indirect costs of childhood obesity were projected to be $13.62 billion in 2022 and $49.02 billion by 2050, according to research published in Obesity Reviews in November 2022. “Given the increased economic burden, additional efforts and resources should be allocated to support sustainable and scalable childhood obesity programs,” the article stated.

Childhood obesity is the number one predictor of adult obesity, which can lead to Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, increased mortality, premature death, disability, and decreased mental health. These are all major disease burdens for national medical systems and huge drains on public finances and population-level health.

For years, criticism has been pointed at medical schools that don’t offer thorough nutritional education. Without that insight, doctors typically focus on treating diseases that arise from poor eating and obesity rather than obesity itself. Nutritional ignorance also results in a health care system that doesn’t provide meaningful support to help people eat better and lose weight, even as taxpayers fund huge subsidies for corn growers.

Corn, including high-fructose corn syrup, is one of the backbone ingredients in processed foods contributing to obesity. Politics and apathy have undermined attempts to clean up food programs in schools, as well as policies that affect health care, agriculture, and the food that makes its way into our homes. Meanwhile, parents and children suffer the effects of misleading food marketing.

Moms on a Mission

Fun and age-appropriate information is one of the key ways to empower children to make food choices in their own health interests. And while the government has largely left families to fend for themselves against food companies that sell alluring products that are cheap, easy, and riddled with problematic ingredients, some parents are trying to fill the educational void.

Fed up and frustrated by scant nutrition information in schools, Liz Haselmayer first wrote a workbook for her own children and released it to the public without knowing if other families wanted real food education. Sales in the first month exceeded the family’s one-year projections. Now Homegrown Education offers several products and has a podcast.

“There’s so much education out there that’s confusing. If it’s confusing for our adults—my gosh, it’s confusing for our kids,” added Haselmayer, who suffered from bulimia as a teen. “I lived a whole decade being malnourished. I just don’t want that for my daughters.”

Part of her aim is to create a counter-narrative about farming practices—returning to what is natural and traditional—through a lens of minimal processing. She also teaches her children what happens in their bodies when they eat ultra-processed foods and why they have a hard time resisting them.

“Why would you take an illness that’s largely driven by the foods we consume and not even look at food as a solution,” Haselmayer said. “You have to attack it at multiple different angles.”

Another mom, Lindsey Garvin, was inspired to write “The Army Inside You,” a book for young children about the microbiome, after her attempts to help her children learn about this crucial aspect of their well-being.

Garvin first searched the greater Seattle public library system for something she could read to her kids about gut health but could only find a book geared toward older children.

A former school teacher, Garvin talked about the microbiome for years in language her children could understand. She had corrected her dysbiosis, an imbalance of gut bacteria, and healed herself of three chronic diseases.

“The first line of defense is to build a healthy microbiome in your body,” she said. “The story of the microbiome is incredible. Our microorganisms have power and can influence almost every system in our body. We have this amazing world of bacteria living in our body, more than human cells, that has control over our health. Yet nobody is talking to children about this.”

The microbiome doesn’t just influence metabolism but also immunity and mental health and offers a perspective of how childhood obesity may develop. The human body has several microbiomes, including the community of microbes in the gut most closely associated with digestion and immunity. Many studies link dysbiosis with obesity.

Early Development

The microbiome is a blueprint of health, and its origins are in childbirth, ideally seeded from the mother’s vagina during delivery. Maternal flora is a byproduct of mom’s diet, so if she’s eating the standard American diet, that will contribute to an inferior colony of bacteria and fungi forming in her baby’s immune system.

“Before you are thinking of conceiving, you have to think about what kind of environment you want to give your children,” Ali said. “This has to start even before a woman gets pregnant.”

The next major influences are the child’s environment, what they eat, and that seemingly inevitable first antibiotic. Kids tend to get around and put everything in their mouths, so they are certainly likely to pick up some microbes that way. Some moms may want to protect their children from germs by sterilizing everything in reach, but harmful chemicals from many cleaners can often be more problematic than a few germs.

When it comes to picking up helpful microbes, breastfeeding is superior to formula, but with more mothers going back to work shortly after a baby is born, formula feeding has become more prevalent, Ali said.

Even though antibiotics are not recommended at the onset of common childhood ailments like ear infections, parents often insist on them and most doctors prescribe them. That’s a problem for a child’s essential microbes. Antibiotics don’t just kill off the pathogenic bacteria, they also kill off the good germ-fighting ones. This compromises a child’s immune system and may also predispose them to obesity.

Parenting Food Fumbles

All too often, parents turn the worst foods their children can eat into the most highly prized foods by using them as behavior rewards. Sweets such as cookies, candy, and ice cream shift microbial balance even as they cause a host of other issues and feed a lifelong sugar habit.

“This is the beginning of what we call emotional eating. We have to stop using food as a reward. This is very important,” Ali said. “We control what’s going to be in our pantries and refrigerators. If you buy junk, you eat junk.”

Grab-and-go foods are also problematic. Many highly-processed crackers and snacks are made from denatured ingredients linked to a host of health issues—and our beneficial microbes don’t like them either.

Teachable Moments

While it can be difficult to get kids to willingly abstain from unhealthy foods designed to tickle their taste buds, there is much parents can do to better prepare them for the temptations ahead.

One suggestion is to involve children in every step of their sustenance, including gardening, meal planning, shopping, and cooking. Talk to them about how food doesn’t just fill our stomachs but serves many purposes.

If children understand that some foods can contribute to illness and other foods can make them feel lighter and happier, they will start to form healthier food associations. You can even teach them about different ingredients. All of this can come in handy when Big Food tries to sell them junk.

Both Haselmayer and Garvin use the word “trickery” with their young children when it comes to food packaging and marketing. When Garvin’s children notice a box with interesting characters, they sleuth the ingredients list.

“It puts them on the same team as mom,” she said. “They’re like, ‘No, I’m not going to be tricked by that.'”

Food Choices at School

Despite repeated attempts by nutritionists and parents to make adjustments to school cafeteria menus, it’s an area that Ali said continues to backslide. For some children, school-supplied lunches are the only meal they eat, which perpetuates systemic, cyclical issues surrounding poverty and childhood obesity.

“The schools are where it can stop,” Ali said.

Menus often include foods fried in unhealthy oils, processed foods, unsafe food, foods with low nutrients, and even junk foods. And then there are food contaminants.

In September, Moms Across America announced the results of a nationwide project measuring pesticides, heavy metals, veterinary drugs, hormones, and nutrients in 43 school lunches from public schools in 15 states.

“These test results of the school lunches show us that we have a national crisis on our hands,” Moms Across America director Zen Honeycutt said in a news release. “Our government is allowing our children to be poisoned with a shocking number of toxins that contribute to various health, behavioral, and learning issues. In addition, the nutrient density of the food is almost completely deficient, leaving our children’s bodies starving for nutrients, unable to develop properly, and lacking nutrients that their brains need to learn and make sound decisions.”

Among the study’s findings:

More than 95 percent of items had detectable levels of glyphosate weed killer, the most widely used herbicide in the world.
More than 65 percent of samples contained wheat ingredients, and all the wheat products tested positive for glyphosate, averaging 42.09 nanograms per gram (ng/g) of food.
The average level of glyphosate in pizza was 154.51 ng/g.

Several items had glyphosate levels above 25 ng/g, which animal studies show is harmful when consumed consistently with other glyphosate items. Glyphosate has been shown to be carcinogenic, endocrine disrupting, and damaging to sperm and reproductive organs. Evidence also shows glyphosate disrupts the microbiome.

School lunches can present parents with a difficult situation. Sometimes school and home messaging can be incongruent. For a child trying to eat well at school, it can feel unfair to be surrounded by peers who are not and seem to have more enticing snacks and meals. When those foods are supplied by the school, it can lead to conflicted food education.

Beyond getting schools to change their menus, parents can also raise the issue with the school administration. Principals need to hear from parents, Ali said.

“Parents have a lot of power. They don’t use that power,” she said.

Policy Proposals

There are efforts to address the problem of school lunch programs. A handful of bills were introduced in the previous Congressional session aimed at better lunch programs and installing gardens at schools. Unfortunately, they all died in committee.

Change is needed outside of schools also. Ali said such changes include listing all ingredients on restaurant menus, including fast foods, and adding a “hazard” warning to high-calorie menu items, similar to the label on cigarettes.

“There’s no reason not to do this,” she said, adding that fast food and dessert serving sizes need to be reduced by half. “It’s not rocket science to figure out.”

Honeycutt recommended the government take immediate action to “supply organically grown, nutrient-dense food to our nation’s children.”

The wheels of change have turned slowly considering childhood obesity has been considered an epidemic for several years.

“If we are dealing with an epidemic, why is it not being looked at as an epidemic?” Ali asks. “There should be counseling, and this should be covered so that everybody is made aware again and again and again that this is important and you need to pay attention.”

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