I am very disappointed to find you promoting the nonsense claim, “We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents.”

It’s not true.

Lies in service of ideology weaken any faith I might have had in other comments by the same faction.

Also, I resent people threatening me or those about whom I care in order to gain my compliance.  Maybe that’s just me, though.

I’m scratching my head over here, Bookwyrm. First, you (and some of your sources) appear to be confused about what these government statistics you cite actually mean. Second, I wonder about the underlying logic of what you seem to be claiming here.

As for the statistics:

Current mortality statistics are based on what people are dying from now, and at what ages. People die and you document how old they were and what they died of.

Life expectancy statistics are based on the average age people who died this year lived to see.

If the government put vodka in our drinking water, we’d all get cirrhosis, but not for a while. Life expectancy rates wouldn’t be affected until we started dying from it. Would that mean vodka in our drinking water wouldn’t be a problem until that occurred?

The impact of childhood obesity on adult mortality rates is no different. Childhood obesity rates are skyrocketing and serious consequences are anticipated decades down the road for those children. That theory - which is based on known effects of obesity in adults as they age and the estimated risk that these children will remain obese throughout their lives - has absolutely no bearing on the current “life expectancy” or current mortality statistics.

That’s why the CDC’s own director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity has stated:

“There’s a huge burden of disease that we can anticipate from the growing obesity in kids. This is a wave that is just moving through the population.” [Source: Washington Post.]

And that’s why not only “the media” but the U.S. government are very concerned about this issue and would like to address it. At what cost, and with what strategy, it should be addressed seem like far more fruitful grounds for debate.

That said, you are still free to disagree with the projected outcome, even now that we’ve established that it would not track with current mortality data. But you have to explain which part of the projection you disagree with. Do you disagree with the claim that childhood obesity is on the rise? Or do you disagree with those who argue that childhood obesity is likely to lead to adult obesity? Or that adult obesity does not contribute to health problems that can lead to a shortened lifespan? There seem to be pretty sound statistics behind all three of these claims. But I’d be happy to be educated otherwise.

Actually, you seem to be mistaken.  Yes, “Current mortality statistics are based on what people are dying from now, and at what ages."  However, the CDC is quite clear about what “life expectancy” means in their press releases.  For example, “A child born in the United States in 2005 can expect to live nearly 78 years (77.9)” (CDC, emphasis mine)  From the same press release, we can see that Mr. Oliver’s particular demons, “heart disease, cancer and stroke – declined in 2005 compared to the previous year.”

Clearly, Mr. Oliver’s projections differ from the CDC’s projections, but claiming that CDC life expectancy projections are retrospective rather than prospective is inaccurate.

Since you ask, though, the evidence seems to suggest that childhood obesity has not shown a statistically significant change over the 6 years covered in the study.  (The childhood charts were changed from height-and-weight to BMI in 2000, making it impractical to use that data to track further back in time.)

I’m not going to bother to argue that childhood obesity is likely to lead to adult obesity; childhood left-handedness is likely to lead to adult left-handedness, childhood height is likely to lead to adult height, and I will accept that fat children are likely to become fat adults.

(cont’d)

I will take exception to the sentence, “Or that adult obesity does not CONTRIBUTE TO health problems that CAN LEAD TO a shortened lifespan."  (emphasis added)  As stated, it does not provide enough of a claim to refute.  I will, however, claim that higher BMI in a socioeconomically and culturally homogenous group does not seem to lead to death, destruction, and despair.  One of the more interesting results from the Helsinki Businessmen Study was that the group that moved from overweight at the beginning of the study to normal weight later in the study, “had highest CVD risk in midlife, and in late life more co-morbidities and greatest total mortality (P < 0.001). Adjusted mortality hazard ratio was 2.0 (95% confidence interval, CI 1.3–3.0; constantly normal weight group as referent). The hazard ratio remained similar (1.9, 95% CI 1.2–3.0) after adjustment for prevalent diseases in 2000.”

One major problem I see with the link between fatness and poor diet presented in things like Mr Oliver’s lecture and others fighting the “obesity epidemic” is that people—and they do exist—who eat potato chips, drink soda, sit around playing video games, and don’t gain weight are unfairly excluded from the attempts to improve their health, while the fat people who eat all their vegetables, walk and bike and generally engage in pleasurable physical activity are blamed for causing excessive healthcare spending.

Bodies are different.  We are different heights, different weights, with different shades on our skin, hair, and eyes.  Some of these are genetically linked, some can be changed behaviourally, and many respond to both environmental and genetic factors.

(cont’d)

Don’t get me wrong—I believe that fresh, tasty foods in schools is a good thing.  I’m not sure why Mr. Oliver thinks that rules out pizza; I tend to find my pizzas topped with fresh vegetables and relatively less meat than I would eat if I were having a burger or grilled cut.  Oh, and for the record, chocolate milk (1%, Neilson Dairy) has 28g grams of sugar per one-cup serving; white milk has 12 grams in the same sized serving with the same fat percentage, meaning that the grams-of-sugar-due-to-it-being-CHOCOLATE-milk would be 14g.  While the 29g of fat in a Snickers bar would appear, on the surface, analogous with the 28g of sugars in a cup of chocolate milk, subtracting the sugars found in a cup of white milk shows a different perspective.  For comparison, a cup of unsweetened orange juice has about 21 grams of sugar, and unsweetened apple juice has 24g of sugar.

So yes, fresh, nutritious foods in schools is a good idea.  Fresh, nutritious foods that children in school will eat is an even better thing; I believe Mr. Oliver struggled to find the balance in earlier stages of his 7-year campaign.  If adding 14g of sugar to milk changes it from not-something-I-will-drink to something-I-enjoy-drinking for any particular person, it seems silly to denounce the evils of adding chocolate to milk.  While working on my own diet, I asked a nutritionist about that very issue.  She responded, “The wider the variety of food you learn to eat, the better your nutrient intake becomes. So, whatever gets the food up off your plate and into your mouth is effectively enhancing its nutritional value.” (emphasis original)

(cont’d)

More significantly, after one year off the program, “Health at every size group members maintained weight, improved in all outcome variables, and sustained improvements. Diet group participants lost weight and showed initial improvement in many variables at 1 year; weight was regained and little improvement was sustained."  (Journal of the American Dietetic Association)

It does not seem unreasonable to me to want to see a non-blaming, individuality-promoting, effective health-improvement technique used as a primary approach to the perceived problem rather than as a remedial approach for people who are already in their thirties and forties and with a long history of “failing” at diets.

Give me the nutrition, but keep the fear/blame/shame in which it’s being wrapped, please, Mr. Oliver. :-)

(Yes, I’m finally done now.)

“the 29g of fat in a Snickers bar would appear, on the surface, analogous with the 28g of sugars in a cup of chocolate milk”

I meant, of course, the 29g of sugars, sorry.