Too much weight tugs at kids' hearts
Need more proof the U.S. childhood obesity crisis may be a ticking time bomb?
"Researchers have found that many schoolchildren are exhibiting early risk factors
of diabetes and heart disease, often displaying troubling symptoms that usually
show up in adults. In fact, a recent study found one in eight children have three
or more risk factors for what doctors call metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms
that serve as an early warning signal for heart disease and diabetes. And more than
half of the children have at least one of the risk factors.
These risk factors include high blood pressure, inefficient processing of glucose,
elevated insulin levels, low levels of "good" HDL cholesterol and elevated triglycerides
-- a fatty substance found in the blood.
But the real culprit is obesity, says study leader Joanne S. Harrell, director of
the Center for Research on Chronic Illness at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
"Almost half of our children are overweight or at risk for overweight," Harrell
says. "These findings document what has been evident to most people who deal with
a large number of children, that obesity is an epidemic in our youngsters."
If parents and educators don't take action, American kids could face an unhealthy
and shortened life, says Dr. Henry McGill, a senior scientist emeritus at the Southwestern
Foundation for Biomedical Research in Texas. McGill has researched the subject of
children and heart disease for decades.
"We know enough about the risk factors related to lifestyle that if we could control
them from adolescence or childhood, we could probably prevent 80 to 90 percent of
coronary heart disease that happens prior to age 65 or 70," McGill says.
McGill and Harrell recommend a number of ways parents can protect their children:
• Encourage kids to exercise and engage in active play;
• Place them -- and the entire family -- on healthier diets, including more fruits
and vegetables and less fat;
• Quit smoking to offer children a healthy role model, and encourage them never
to start;
• Petition your schools to include more physical education, with an emphasis on
active games that involve even non-athletic children;
• Ask educators to remove soft drink and vending machines from schools, and provide
healthy meals and snacks.
"There's no magic here," McGill says. "People have to eat less and move around more,
although everything in our culture is against that."
Harrell's team followed more than 3,200 students, about half boys and half girls
between the ages of 8 and 17, in a rural North Carolina county. The researchers
evaluated each student's body mass index, a ratio of weight to height, along with
other risk factors.
More than half of the children had at least one of the risk factors for metabolic
syndrome. About one-quarter of the children had two or more factors, and one in
eight had three or more.
Most troubling, about 8 percent of children aged 8 or 9 already displayed three
or more risk factors, Harrell says.
Girls suffered more often from the risk factors, she says. About 16 percent of girls
had three or more, compared with 10 percent of boys with three or more.
The most common risk factor was a lack of "good" HDL cholesterol. That was found
in more than 40 percent of the children.
One in four children was classified as overweight. "We found that 26 percent were
at or above the 95th percentile for expected weight given their age and gender,"
she says. "You would expect only 5 percent to be at that."
About an equal number were considered at risk for becoming overweight.
High levels of insulin were found in 16 percent of the children, high blood pressure
in 10 percent, high triglycerides in 8 percent and glucose intolerance in about"