by Barbara Berkeley
Between February, 1966 and December, 2003, children living in Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community were part of an ambitious study. Nearly 5,000 kids born between 1945 and 1984, were examined and followed. The question under study was this: To what extent would obesity, glucose problems, blood pressure, and cholesterol effect the lifespan of these children? Specifically, which factors would be associated with death before the age of 55?
During the study period, 559 of the subjects died prematurely. The strongest predictor for dying young was obesity. Kids who had been at the highest weights had about 230% the chance of dying early than did kids at the lowest weights. Blood sugar and blood pressure in childhood also raised the risk of dying young, but not as much. In addition, these two factors were almost exclusively tied to the degree of obesity. An interesting sidebar was the observation that childhood cholesterol elevations did not effect the risk…at least in this population. Cholesterol levels tend to be lower in Native American populations in general which may have explained this finding.
The new England Journal http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/362/6/485 references similar childhood studies conducted earlier in the 20th century. One of the problems with these studies is that they didn't have enough heavy kids to follow. In a study done in Wales, for example, just 4% of the children had a BMI that was higher than the 90th percentile. The Arizona study, on the other hand, looked at a population in which 28.7% of the children were obese. This is because the Arizona researchers studied Pima Indians, a group which is particularly susceptible to the harmful effects of the western diet. The Pimas’ problems with obesity go back many decades.
In the United States, the current prevalence of overweight and obese kids stands at 15%. This is TRIPLE what it was in 1960. The news is worse for African-American and Hispanic kids, who have O and O rates that are similar to those of the Pima.
These data are extremely important for readers of this site. The tendency to react poorly to the American diet is a reflection of genetics. This is clearly demonstrated by the Pima Indians. It is also clearly demonstrated in the tendency of families to become overweight and develop related illnesses. Unfortunately, this genetic intolerance to the SAD has gotten muddled up with a lot of pop science and magazine talk. We are searching for the cause of our problem in bizarre explanations that range from broken metabolisms, to infectious causes, to lack of running the marathon.
Here’s the point. If you are a maintainer and have struggled with weight throughout your life, it is highly probable that your kids (even if currently skinny) will be in the same boat eventually. As parents, you can prevent this. You can give them the best odds of living long and healthy lives. All you need to do is to promote the very diet that you consume as a maintainer. Whatever diet has enabled you to keep weight off is a healthy variant of the SAD. That diet is likely to be the one that will prevent gain in your kids.
This stuff is for real. Each of us can build a healthier America by working family by family. If we do, we won’t have to worry about a bankrupted health care system or a country in which life expectancy plummets for the first time. Let’s spread the word.
