Lebanon, New Hampshire (dpa) – It’s Saturday afternoon at the shopping mall and
the Weathervane is teeming with customers. Good prices and a convenient
location make the restaurant a popular place for families, but the real draw is
its trademark – gigantic portions of food.
Customers choose from huge servings of fish, massive hamburgers and piles of
French fried potatoes. “Small” sodas are actually large, and “large” drinks
hold more than a litre. There is no limit to the rolls and pickles, and rich
cakes and sundaes awaiting those who still have room. Many do.
As the economy booms, double-income American families are eating out more.
Obesity rates are soaring, and are starting to affect children as much as
adults.
“What we’re seeing is children with adult kinds of disease, which is something
that you never used to see,” says Jean Harvey-Berino, a professor of nutrition
and food sciences at the University of Vermont.
“We’re seeing children with hypertension. We’re seeing children with high blood
cholesterol levels. We’re seeing children with Type 2 diabetes, which used to
be considered the adult version of diabetes.”
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), over half, or about 97
million Americans, are overweight. Of those, some four million are more than 46
kilograms heavier than they should be, resulting in mortality rates about ten
times that of the general population in the same age group.
For children, the obesity rate is about one in five. Obesity- related diseases
are starting to affect children as young as age five, but are also turning up
in school-aged children and adolescents.
The trend has appeared so fast that genetic factors can be all but ruled out as
a cause, says Harvey-Berino, who is conducting two research projects on weight
problems in pre-school children.
“We have noticed that it is probably more related to a decrease in physical
activity and to eating larger portions. It is simply the ‘super size’
phenomenon of getting servings that are ten times bigger than they need to
be.”
With schools under pressure to increase class time and raise the quality of
education, physical education gets less attention, so children are not as
likely to go outside and expend energy.
“Like music and art,” she says, “people see physical education as
dispensable.”
Vermont’s Public Health Nutrition Chief, Allison Gardner, stresses the many
cultural factors that contribute to childhood obesity.
“So many things have changed in our society in the last 15 to 20 years. More
women are working outside the home, so kids are feeding themselves after
school.
“Kids are not playing outside because it’s not safe, or they are unsupervised.
They are watching TV, they are less active, they are eating more convenience
foods, and eating out more,” she said.
“Unfortunately, it’s a big problem that’s growing.”
Over-stressed American parents also commonly resort to sweets as behaviour
modification tools. At a Friendly’s Ice Cream parlour recently, a young couple
silenced their screeching toddler and 5- year-old with hefty hot fudge sundaes.
Gardner says Vermont has formed a task force to study the problem and devise
solutions.
New York State has introduced an “Eat Well – Play Hard” project focussed on
educating lower-income families, who along with Mexican, Hispanic, and African-
American families tend to have higher obesity rates. And five U.S. states are
getting NIH funding to determine what is causing what Secretary of Agriculture
Dan Glickman has called “a quiet epidemic”.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has spoken of instituting low- calorie
school lunch programmes, a supplemental nutrition programme for low-income
women, and other educational programmes, but little has been done.
“More federal money is tied to smoking prevention and diseases such as heart
disease,” Gardner laments. “Obesity is not seen as a disease. We are definitely
getting better at treating people who want to lose weight, but childhood
obesity is an emerging field that we don’t know much about yet.”
What concerns Harvey-Berino is what will happen to today’s obese children when
they become adults.
“We don’t really know what the long-term effects will be, although certainly we
are worried that in 20 years we’re going to see this huge balloon of chronic
disease, and that it’s going to cost health care programs billions of dollars.”
