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The Terrible Dangers of Childhood Obesity
An Excerpt from The Highly Healthy Child
By Dr. Walt Larimore
Childhood obesity also increases the risk of childhood diseases that were rare when I entered medicine in the 1970s. Such diseases include type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, early hardening of arteries, soaring cholesterol levels, sleep apnea, stomach and pancreas disease, liver and gall bladder disease, increased cardiovascular risk factors, early arthritis and many more. In fact, the American Heart Association estimates that 27 million children under the age of 19 have high cholesterol and that 2.2 million have high blood pressure.
Type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic in adolescents. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predict that one in three American children born in 2000 will go on to develop diabetes. And up to 50 percent of children with these diseases don't even know they have them!
Childhood obesity can yield emotional and social trauma as well. For years we've known that chubby children are teased and bullied by their classmates, which can lead to low self-esteem. Not until recently did we learn how badly obesity affects children emotionally and socially. In 2003, University of California researchers compared quality of life scores of obese children with those of healthy, normal-weight children and children with cancer who have had chemotherapy. Obese children are five and a half times as likely to report an impaired quality of life as healthy, normal-weight children. Even more shocking, severely obese children rate their quality of life as about the same as children with cancer who have been treated with chemotherapy!
