Philip J. Goscienski, M.D.
August 2009
In mid-June of 2009 the Centers for disease Control and Prevention reported that there had been nearly 18,000 probable and confirmed cases of swine flu in the U.S. The fatality rate appears to be approximately one-quarter of one percent. The nation is mobilizing its medical resources to combat the threat, not inappropriately. Worse threats, however, are receiving little money or attention because they are not as dramatic and they affect non-voters.
The effort to reverse childhood obesity is failing. American children are fatter than any previous generation and that has spawned at least three other major epidemics, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and a form of liver disease that will ultimately be fatal for many. The tragic irony is that each of these conditions is almost entirely preventable. They were extremely rare barely a half-century ago.
The linchpin is childhood obesity, a condition of complex causes but definitely avoidable. It has quadrupled since I saw my first pediatric patient 50 years ago. Almost all the victims of childhood hypertension, type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease are obese or overweight.
As if children didn't have enough learning challenges, even a modest elevation of blood pressure causes poorer thinking and memory skills. Hypertension is the single most important factor in future heart disease and stroke.
The CDC projects that fully one-third of today's second-graders will develop diabetes when they reach middle age; among Hispanics it will be well over half. Since the 1980s almost every projection regarding the future incidence of type 2 diabetes has grossly underestimated the eventual numbers. I expect the same of the CDC estimate.
Some experts believe that half of obese children will develop fatty liver disease and will be at risk of cirrhosis, liver cancer or liver failure. They predict that by 2020 it will be the major reason for liver transplants, a situation that is probably not even being considered by the nation's healthcare budget planners.
How many more deleterious effects of childhood obesity remain to be uncovered in the years ahead — and will it be too late to do anything about them?
Mindset, not money, will change the course of these epidemics whose mortality figures will dwarf those of swine flu. Until we teach our children how to be more active and to eat the kind and amount of food that their bodies require, good health will be a memory that belongs to earlier generations.
Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him at drphil@stoneagedoc.com.