by Amanda McQuade Crawford, MA, RH (AHG), MCPP
One of every five children is overweight, while some estimates claim the number may be as high as one in three. In recent years, lap banding has become an increasingly common procedure among teens. Fad diets, reasonable diets, and medically supervised diets are big business. The annual sales figures keep growing bigger. Yet as a cultural group, North Americans seem to exhibit collective stress at two ends of the spectrum—media adoration and reviling of two groups: 1. Girls with eating disorders 2. People consuming sugars, salts, fats and chemically laced foods until they cannot fit in regular chairs.
The juggernaut of industrial food, mass media, and commerce is not perhaps the clinician’s first target. My belief is that childhood obesity is not the fault of the dreadful food that is pushed in mainstream culture. Rather, it’s the attitude that allows parents, school dieticians, and growing children to think that processed convenience items are food at all. Our work is to educate patients about foods that help our nation’s children meet weight goals safely. To combat advertising requires a change of consciousness, and it is this that clinicians can inspire while they focus on children’s health.