Why should we care about managing our families’ weight? Obesity in America has been on the rise since the 1970s. Today, approximately 65% of adults are overweight, with sixty-one million of them considered obese. Overweight and obese adults will have a shorter life span than previous generations. The causes of being overweight and obese include ultra-processed food, fast-food, increased caloric-intake, decreased activity and exercise, increased stress, poor parenting, and inadequate weight loss programs. All of the commercial weight loss programs fail to keep weight off post program. In addition, they can cause decreased calorie burn and hunger, and do not address lifestyle change. The commercial diets we see advertised can cause loss of muscle (which decreases metabolism) and change the microbiomes of the intestinal tract causing hunger and further loss of metabolism.
About 30 years ago, the weight of children and adolescents began to increase. We were aware of this at The Hope Heart Institute and started our research on how to treat the adult obesity epidemic and expanded our research into childhood obesity. Today we not only have obese children, but many are super obese. In the period of 2015 – 2016, of children 2 to 5 years old, 15% were obese and 2% severely obese: of Children 6 – 11 years old, 18% were obese and 5% severely obese: of Adolescents 12 – 19 years old, 21% were obese and 8% severely obese. Long term, childhood obesity is associated with increased cardiovascular disease, hip and knee osteoarthritis and multiple cancers.
Any extra pounds usually add up to health problems. In adults, overweight and obesity are linked to increased body inflammation which results in heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, many cancers, osteoarthritis, depression, sleep problems, and many other conditions.
For children, being overweight starts “body inflammation” earlier in life. This can result in the same disorders found in adults: High cholesterol, high blood pressure and Type 2 Diabetes. A generation ago, Type 2 Diabetes in children was unheard of. Now physicians are treating this disease in kids as young as four years old. Overweight children are also more likely to become overweight or obese adults about 80% of the time.
A person’s weight is the result of many things working together – genes, microbiomes, activity level, behavior, and environment to name just a few.
Changes in our environment that are making it harder to engage in healthy behavior have a lot to do with our overall increase in weight over the past few decades. For example:
• We’re an in-the-car and sit-behind-a-desk society. For many of us – parents and children alike – daily life doesn’t involve a lot of physical activity. So we need fewer calories than the previous generation. If we want to be active, we have to make an effort.
• Food is everywhere, along with messages telling us to eat, drink and feel good. We can get something to eat in places where it was never available before – like the gas station. Going out to eat or buying carryout is easy. The foods we consume away from home are high in calories, saturated fat and salt. Today over 50% of meals are eaten away from home and another 15% - 20% are meals that are prepared in restaurants and carried home to the family.
• Food portions at restaurants, and at home, are bigger than they used to be. Restaurants don’t want us to go away hungry so they serve two to three times the amount our bodies need.
In the 1980s we started researching how to successfully treat the overweight/obese epidemic and continue today with programs like 20/20 LifeStyles, which has added the review of patient’s genetics to further personalize their program. For the last several years, we have been studying gut microbiomes to determine their relationship to weight gain, diseases and disorders like Type 2 Diabetes.
We also created a children’s program called Committed to Kids which had great long term weight maintenance results of more than 75% after three years. The program saw the most success when parents were engaged in their child’s weight loss program since parents play a key role in their children’s choices and behaviors. We have found that some parents, who do not engage, are in denial regarding their child’s unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, such as poor diet and lack of exercise. Our psychology team is searching for the right message to overcome this resistance. We hope that the addition of genetic screening and the ability to review the child’s genetic profile will aid in parental participation.