On Childhood Obesity

[Blithe Morning]

Getting children on board w/ No S is pretty important. I've been doing some childhood obesity work and the statistics are alarming. My state, SD, is ranked 35th in the nation in terms of childhood obesity with a rate of 13.5% according to a Robert Wood Johnson study. (F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future) This doesn't sound that bad... until you realize that the national average for childhood obesity in 1980 was less than 7%. In other words, a state with a relatively low percentage of childhood obesity is double what it was 30 years ago. And adult obesity is 28% but we are something like 15th in the nation.

I am intrigued how the French dealt with increasing childhood obesity rates during the last part of the 19th/early 20th century, principally through the puericulture movement. Greg Critser in the book "Fat Land" has an excellent overview (pp36-37).

Soon, French mothers were being taught a new puericulture dogma. The essentials were this: Plump children were not necessarily a oint of pride; mealtimes should be as nearly set in stone as possible; snacks, except on rare occasions, were to be forbidden; second helping were out of the question, save, perhaps, on a holiday; children should eat separately from adults, so as "to avoid arousing his desires" with richer adult far. And the child was never to be left to his or her own personal choice.

I think this way of training children to eat - which I assume continues in some form to this day - helps explain why the French eat goat cheese, white bread and red wine for dinner and remain slim and here in the US we eat all manner of fake diet food and are increasingly fatter. There are other factors too, but I think early training is an important part of the whole tangled knot of factors.

I must admit, there are aspects of this method that seem extreme. I don't think I could be as hard core as the French system recommended (and still may recommend for all I know). I know that I was strongly influenced by the American child rearing teachings of the 80's that recommended allowing children to eat as much and when they wanted as children will naturally eat till they are full and will not overeat. This did not serve my children well, especially my youngest son who is overweight. My oldest son was heavy as a child but through sports lost his weight and then really lost it when he joined the Marines.

I wish I knew then what I know now, and what is known now. Critser sites research that shows children will stop eating when they are full when toddlers, by the age of 5 children are following the eating patterns the rest of us have (see Mindless Eating).

If I could do it all over again, I would have been stricter with the snacks and the sweets. So yeah, there's more than a little mother guilt here.
On the positive side, they are all aware of No S me having come to it when they were teens and older. This means that I was/am the adult on the Charlie Brown cartoons (mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah) but when they are ready they will have a strategy.