O.M.G.

That's about all I can say right now about this destructive, damaging, obscene board game meant for preschoolers. It's about as subtle as a fart gag, and about a million times more noxious, because it seems designed to turn young children into budding anorexics.

The incomparable Sandy Szwarc had a lot to say about this today. As she points out, "[The game] teaches that foods, especially “bad” foods, make them fat. The message illustrated is that when a food is eaten, they must purge by expending a certain number of calories in exercise to avoid getting fat. Calorie counting before they can count."

The game reminds me of another ill-advised project of the last year, the inexplicable collaboration between two of my favorite children's authors on a book demonizing fat people and making plenty o' assumptions about them.

May Hungry Hank go the way of The Gulps. And fast.

Bet you won't see any mainstream news stories about this

And by "this" I'm referring to the results of the biggest clinical trial of healthy eating ever, as reported by Sandy Szwarc over at Junkfood Science. We're talking about part one of the Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial, which posted results like these:

• Healthy eating had no effects on rates of cardiovascular disease.
• Healthy eating had no effects on rates of breast or colorectal cancers.
• Women who followed a "healthy (lower-fat) diet did not wind up thinner.
• Women who didn't "watch what they ate" and ate more fat and calories didn't wind up fatter.

Did you read any news stories about this? Me neither.

Results from Part II are about to come out. I can't wait to not read those, too.

Sandy Szwarc is my hero

If you'd like to know why, see her blog post today on disease vectors at http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/08/disease-vectors.html.

No, it's bad news

A couple of days ago I posted about a new study out of Finland showing that anorexia is both--as the media are reporting it--"more common and more transient than previously believed." It took me a few days, but I finally figured out what's bugging me about this: the word transient.

Transient is something that happens for a hour or two and then disappears. Transient is fleeting, momentary, temporary.

Transient is not what happens when the demon of anorexia inhabits someone, body and mind and soul, for three or five or seven years. Transient is not losing most of your adolescence and some of your young adult years to a disease that's like an eclipse of the world-as-you-know-it.

Transient is when they close the street to do construction repairs. Transient is not when the street gets blown up. Even if it gets fixed five years later.

One thing I've learned from Sandy Szwarc is to look behind the rhetoric when it comes to studies and research findings. In this case, it's the interpretation, I suspect, that's bugging me. I don't know if it's the study's authors, or the media reporting it, or both. All I know is that anything that puts a child into hell for longer than an hour or two is not transient. Not at all.

At risk for what?

This just in: Experts are now urging women to watch their weight before pregnancy and get back to their pre-pregnancy weight quickly after giving birth. Their new recommendations include:

* Body mass index should be measured as part of vital signs at routine annual check-ups and all women of child bearing age should be counseled to achieve and maintain optimal BMI.
* Preconception counseling programs should include education regarding the poor maternal and perinatal outcomes among the obese and overweight.
* Women with high BMI planning a pregnancy should be counseled to participate in intensive nutrition programs aimed to achieve optimum BMI prior to conception.
* Encouraging breastfeeding can partially help to decrease childhood obesity and also help mother to return quickly to pre-pregnancy weight.

Why the panic? Because, say these researchers, "maternal obesity" leads to all kinds of terrible things for babies, including higher C-section rates, "less chance" of being breastfed, obesity later in life, and--I kid you not--"high birth weight."

And here I thought low birth weight was the big risk when it comes to babies and weight. After all, low birth weight can contribute to respiratory problems, cardiovascular problems, infections, neurological problems, SIDS, cerebral palsy, and other medical issues.

But never mind all that. As we should all know by now, it's much worse to be fat than any of those.

I guess they never heard of genetics, and have never read the dismal statistics on weight loss, or followed the studies that show that losing weight if you're fat actually increases your health risks on many levels.

As Sandy Szwarc pointed out in a recent post, there are people who think you can be too fat to love a child. I guess you can be too fat to have a child too.

Sandy Szwarc does it again

This morning I read the following sentence in Sandy Szwarc's most recent post in her Junkfood Science blog:

"Far more young people are dying from anorexia than . . . from being fat."

Tears sprang to my eyes. That is exactly right.

The emphasis on "overweight children and teens" clouds the issue for the public and for health professionals. So long as doctors and the rest of us are so terrified of being fat, and of having our children be fat, lethal eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia will be underdiagnosed, mistreated, and poorly researched.

Thank you, Sandy, for putting it so plainly.

The Big O

A quick post this morning because I couldn't resist linking to the blog of Sandy Szwarc, whose smart, thought-provoking blog I love. Recently she wrote about the so-called obesity "epidemic" in a way that had me cheering from the sidelines.

This follows on the heels of my pulling my sixth-grader out of her required "wellness" class, at least for the nutrition and "obesity" parts of the class. Because isn't it a great idea to take a bunch of impressionable 6th-graders and brainwash them into thinking that the only healthy food out there is a carrot stick or salad (hold the dressing!)? Given the fact that most eating disorders start between 11 and 17, this seems like a bad idea to me, especially the way such things are taught. But don't take my word for it--read Sandy Szwarc's blog. Great stuff.