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Saturday, April 18, 2009

But let's not allow facts to interfere with our right as a society to loathe fat people
Posted by Jill | 6:37 PM
As hard as it was to be a fat kid when I was one, it's even worse today. After all, when I was a kid, Barbie may have been impossibly curvy, but at least she had a shape. And most of us didn't eat fast food, so they couldn't blame it on neglectful mothers feeding their kids McDonald's. In our family, we were chubby not because we gorged on sweets, but because we were from Russian and Polish peasant stock, our parents battled their weight, and because we were fed too much food, particularly meat. My father grew up during the Depression, and my mother was emotionally deprived when she was a child, so with their relationship with food not being all that healthy, we really didn't have much of a chance. Exercise and outdoor play wasn't exactly a priority either, and as a fearful and uncoordinated kid, school gym classes (which DCap, who is close to my age, outlined quite nicely earlier this week), I learned very early on that where sports and physical activity were concerned, "can't win, don't try. Add to my own situation being unusually short, and it was a perfect storm for lifelong weight issues.

As an adult, I've learned how to eat like a normal person, not that it's helped me with my weight issues. I went through my 'OMG I CAN EAT ALL THE ICE CREAM AND COOKIES I WANT NOW" phase when I moved out on my own, followed of course by the crash diet from which my metabolism never recovered, and finally ending up where they are now, with no white bread and yogurt and granola and lean meat and fish and no fried foods and no fast foods and lots of fruits and vegetables. But of course even though they keep finding biological reasons beyond "calories in, calories out" as to why some people are able to eat whatever they want and never gain a pound, the rest of us are expected to subsist on a lettuce leaf and the morning dew if that's what it takes to be thin.

I haven't had a blood draw in four years because I'm afraid to go to an internist who'll just tell me to go on a diet. Sorry, bub, been there, done that, and the last internist I went to was a size two, and that doesn't help either. But I cling to hope that someday children will be able to grow up and not be blamed for their own obesity.

I'd like to believe that time is now:

Exposure to chemicals used in plastics may be linked with childhood obesity, according to results from a long-term health study on girls who live in East Harlem and surrounding communities that were presented to community leaders on Thursday by researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center.


The chemicals in question are called phthalates, which are used to to make plastics pliable and in personal care products. Phthalates, which are absorbed into the body, are a type of endocrine disruptor — chemicals that affect glands and hormones that regulate many bodily functions. They have raised concerns as possible carcinogens for more than a decade, but attention over their role in obesity is relatively recent.


The research linking endocrine disruptors with obesity has been growing recently. A number of animal studies have shown that exposing mice to some endocrine disruptors causes them be more obese. Chemicals that have raised concern include Bisphenol A (which is used in plastics) and perfluorooctanoic acid, which is often used to create nonstick surfaces.


However, the East Harlem study, which includes data published in the journal Epidemiology, presents some of the first evidence linking obesity and endocrine disruptors in humans.


The researchers measured exposure to phthalates by looking at the children’s urine. “The heaviest girls have the highest levels of phthalates metabolites in their urine,” said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai, one of the lead researchers on the study. “It goes up as the children get heavier, but it’s most evident in the heaviest kids.”




I'd like to believe that time is now, but it probably isn't. Watch for reports any day now from doctors who say that because some kids are more sensitive to phthalates than others, it just means that those kids who are will have to be careful all their lives about what they eat.

Because God forbid we should do anything about the packaging.

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1 Comments:
Blogger missy said...
When I was working as a physician's assistant in college, we had a young African American girl come in - she was 12 years old, 5'4" and weighed 403 lbs. I remember thinking that it just couldn't be possible for a girl that age to have consumed enough calories both to reach and to maintain that weight - a normal person would burn through 2,000-3,000 calories a day just to move that body mass around.

Thanks for finally providing me with a possible answer as to what caused that poor young girl's medical obesity.
4/20/09, 12:03 PM  
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