Not satisfied with her single record as world’s heaviest mother, Simpson has set her aim on an even larger distinction. She is pushing to weigh 453 kgs. And she’d like you to pay to watch her do it.

On her website, people can watch Donna’s progress and donate money. She then uses the money to buy more food.

And of course, she’s an American.

It’s incredible that a person could have such drive and tenacity for such a harmful thing. She has the desire and endurance of an athlete. But what kind of legacy does she leave her two kids when she becomes “the woman who died trying to weigh 453 kgs”? What lessons is she teaching them about taking care of yourself, the value of life and how far one should go just for attention?

I can’t say this reflects well on the people donating to her site either. What on earth are they supporting? A morbid laugh? The chance to take part in someone’s death?

Source: Telegraph

Dr. Elsie M. Taveras, an assistant professor of population medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, feels that, while there is not yet any hard data from controlled studies to prove it, observational studies show that there are many risk factors in prenatal, infancy and early childhood that eventually steer children toward becoming obese adults.

Let’s start with the Mum-to-be.  A kid’s likelihood of obesity is raised when the mum is overweight.  Considering that almost half of pregnant Americans are either overweight or obese, this is strike one for many children.

Tack on to that the fact that gaining too much weight during pregnancy and/or contracting gestational diabetes can also influence kids to be overweight later in life.  Consider that strike two.

Once the baby is born, parents are urged to pay attention to the ratio of height vs. weight.  If the child’s poundage is high for his height, there’s a good change he could be obese by as early as age 3.  Excessive weight gain in the first year can be an indicator of future obesity.  Whether physical or psychological, the body is conditioned to expect more food.

Clearly there’s no such thing as starting too early.

Image: childpack.com

Researchers from NSW’s University of New England studied more than 4500 pre-schoolers, conducted face-to-face interviews with mothers and measured their child’s height and weight at ages four to five, and again two years later, at ages six to seven.

They found that overall, children of part-time working mums watched about an hour less television each week than both stay-at-home mums and full-time workers.

Their kids also ate fewer snack foods, had more time to exercise and were exposed to less junk-food advertising.

Researchers haven’t nailed the reasons behind their findings, but have a few theories. Co-author of the study and associate professor Jan Nicholson, principal research fellow at Melbourne’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, said: “When mothers work part-time, there’s obviously something about the way the house is run, and the way parents are looking after their children that is protective.”

The study concluded that mothers who worked part-time worked hard on making the right choices during the time they did have with their children.

Obviously it’s just a study based on averages, but it rings true for me. I find when I’m not working we fill in the time with trips to cafes and friends’ houses that inevitably involve treat foods. When I’m working too much, we eat convenience foods.

A big glaring ommission in this study (or the reporting of the study) seems to be the involvement of dads, but we already know that it’s all the mother’s fault, right?

The study found that obese teenagers who have gastric band surgery lose remarkably more weight than those on a diet.

25 obese teenagers were placed on a supervised weight loss regime, while another 25 were given gastric banding surgery to suppress their appetite. Those on a diet lost an average of 3 kilograms, while those who underwent surgery lost an average of 35 kilograms. It looks clear on paper, but critics say that having surgery to stop obesity sends the wrong message for young people and is risky.

The study, led by Monash University’s Centre for Obesity Research and Education, appears today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Study author Associate Professor John Dixon, argues that the benefits of surgery outweigh the risks.

“This isn’t drastic treatment. This is surgery that you can have done in the same day. It is very safe surgery and the effects on ill children and adolescents are profound,” he says.

He believes gastric banding could lower the risk of future disease and provide a better quality of life.

But critics point to the complications of the surgery that occurred as part of the study. One third of those who received the gastric banding required follow-up surgery during the two-year study period.

Two of the patients received injuries during adjustments to the band, while six suffered “proximal gastric enlargement”.

Associate Professor Jeff Walkley of RMIT University in Melbourne, said that the procedure is not risk free. “It places the children in contact with risk and clearly what we want to do is to reduce the amount of risk,” he says.

“It’s clear that it leads to dramatic weight loss, but it’s less clear whether from a long-term perspective – not just two years, but five or ten years – whether there will be any adverse outcomes.”

He thinks that the diet and exercise group could have been given a better program.

“They recommended 30 minutes of activity a day plus 10,000 steps,” he says. “[But] the current recommendation set for kids who are not overweight or obese in Australia is 60 minutes of physical activity daily.”

After having a friend almost die undergoing this supposedly “non-drastic” surgery I am probably a little biased. I am not sure I would want my child to undergo surgery as the first option for weight loss. But I’d also hate to see them burdened with severe obesity. Would you allow your teen to get a lapband?

According to Dr. Joyce Lee, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Michigan, “there was a paucity of studies in boys.” Dr. Lee is the lead author of a new study looking at the connection between weight and puberty in boys. Her research found that boys who are obese are twice as likely to have not started puberty by the age of 11 as are kids of normal weight. The study, which followed more than 400 boys, found that 14 percent of overweight lads had not started puberty at the end of the study as compared to 7 percent of normal-weight boys.

While this may not seem a big deal to many, there are implications, as Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, points out. “This could add a further burden to obese, adolescent boys,” he says. “For [a boy] that may already be teased because of his appearance, delayed puberty could further increase the stigmatization.”

So now there’s another reason for all of us to make sure our kids are healthy — as if we needed another. “I think the fact that obesity could affect how they currently grow and develop could be of greater concern to parents because that affects them in the short term,” says Dr. Lee. What do you think?

Photo: clarita

Of her plans to take on childhood obesity in America Mrs. Obama said, “There are the shocking statistics that are there. One in three kids are obese in this nation. The most shocking sort of reality that really hits you is that, because the young generation is on track for the first time in this nation’s history of being less healthy, having a shorter life span than their parents.”

In the interview the first lady comes across as an involved parent who has managed to maintain her identity despite being thrust into the spotlight. “I still see myself as Michelle Obama, the girl who grew up in the South Side of Chicago,” Mrs. Obama said. “I’ve got this husband who does these interesting things — and I’m Malia and Sasha’s mother.

“Just like many working parents, it’s balance. People may have said I’ve taken on too many issues or what have you, but I usually work two or three days a week, and we try to pack everything into a day,” she continued. “I don’t work on the weekends. I don’t travel on the days that I’m not there.”

Mrs. Obama says she doesn’t start work until her daughters leave for school, and she returns to the White House living quarters when they come home in the afternoon. When the family gathers for dinner (she stresses that the president doesn’t bring his job with him) they play a game called “roses and thorns,” where each person reports the day’s good events — the roses — and the bad — thorns.

When asked by Lauer what her roses and thorns for the day would be Mrs. Obama replied, “Well, the best thing is always dinnertime, so it hasn’t happened yet. Haven’t had a thorn yet.”

Watch the interview below:

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that when compared with the US, China and the UK, Australian women’s BMI is rising faster than other nations.

Researchers measured the top 5 per cent of obese women in Australia at age 30 and found an average BMI score of 37.7.

The index’s increase over 10 years has been more than double the international average. In fact, we’re inching closer to America’s stats – where the top 5 per cent of women averaged a BMI score of 42.5.

So why the sensationalist title? The age at which women’s weight starts to creep up seems to correlate with the age women start to bear children.

Institute of Obesity, Nutrition and Exercise director Professor Ian Caterson said, “What we have known is that for the past five years, people have been gaining weight and they are women aged between 25 and 35,” he said.

So I’m just putting it out there – did pregnancy and childbirth send your weight off the scales? or were there other lifestyle factors?

Source

The couple’s lawyer says the kids were taken by UK officials because of her clients’ weight issues.

The authorities deny it, but early in September, when mum was still pregnant, the Times reported two of the kids were removed because they were feared to be leaning towards dangerous. One son, a 12- or 13-year-old boy (his exact age varies by account) who weighs around 102kg, was becoming a concern for the parents, who sought the help of local officials to get his weight under control.

But instead of helping them, the parents said social workers made a surprise visit and took two of the kids. Then they came back, eventually taking all seven, including the boy and a baby born just this week.

Extreme obesity is becoming a recognised form of child abuse, and scientists have found that overweight parents beget overweight kids — not just through genetics but because of the poor eating habits handed down to the next generation. Is it fair, however, to go after parents who were seeking help for their child?

I’m also curious to see how many consider 102kg on a teenage boy child abuse.  It’s overweight, definitely, but we’re not talking about that 252kg child in South Carolina that recently made news.

Image: Sky News

Dr Elsie Tavares of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Harvard Medical School found that the faster babies gained weight in the first six months of life, the more likely they are to face weight problems by the time they are three years old.

I know the two kids in my house go against those findings — both gained weight fast, nursed loads and were super pudgy babies, and now one is a skinny stringbean of a four-year-old and the other, who we seriously feared was headed for a sumo career because he was so chunky, is 19 months old and in the 25th percentile for weight. I know tonnes of other kids who followed the same pattern. One theory I have heard about this is that breastfed kids gain weight fast because of the high sugar content of the milk, and as they get older and don’t need to nurse as much and start eating solids, the milk becomes less calorific. Again, just a theory and I’m not remotely claiming it’s science, but it seems to explain the kids I know.

There’s more in the linked article, like a study that followed 96 mothers as they fed their babies formula. It found babies that ate eight times a day versus seven were much more likely to be overweight, and that mothers often missed the cue that the baby had had enough (pulling their head away from the bottle).

Personally, I think too much fear over childhood obesity is causing parents to do things that aren’t in the best interests of their babies, like discouraging a nine-month-old’s love of food, putting young kids on skim milk, or obsessing over every morsel. Po Bronson writes in NurtureShock about a really good study that correlated lack of sleep with obesity, for example. And I think that offering nutritious foods and laying off the sugar and processed crap, modelling good eating habits, not assigning values like “good” and “bad” to foods, and getting everybody outside for a walk or game of hide and seek on a regular basis is going to go a lot further towards making our kids healthy at any size than fixating on obesity as a horrible fate.

Z Recommends – who initially broke the story of how bogus Sigg’s BPA-free claims were – has a new story of water bottles gone bad that makes Sigg’s look like they’re candy coated.

The blog posting this week notes Gaiam – known as the go-to for yoga gear – “quietly added information to its retail website which admits to independent lab test results showing leaching levels at 23.8 parts per billion.”

That’s 20 TIMES the amount of BPA that was found in the Sigg bottles. And, yes, these were bottles being marketed as “BPA-free.”

Among those still being marked as BPA-free, the company has added this disclaimer: “We also took additional steps to help ensure your safety via independent laboratory tests that go well beyond FDA (US regulatory body, the Food and Drug Administration) requirements. An independent lab subjected our aluminium water bottles to continuous extreme heat — nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — in an environmental chamber for three days while the bottles were filled with water. Under these extreme conditions, a trace amount of BPA (23.8 parts per billion) was detected in the water inside the bottle.”

Trace amounts, huh? Does that sound like it’s BPA FREE?

Studies have linked BPA to everything from cancer and obesity to problems with brain function and mood disorders. And recently the stories of BPA issues have been mounting. The latest? Kids don’t need to even ingest it themselves – a pregnant woman (maybe one doing prenatal yoga – ahem) who intakes BPA may be creating aggression in her kids.

I gave birth just four years ago, and the amount of information on BPA has seemed to quadruple in that time. So too have the number of companies marketing “BPA-free” products . . . and those whose claims are falling flat.

Do you look for the BPA-free label? Do you trust it?

Image: Amazon

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