This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! The US Preventive Services Task Force has put forth draft guidelines for higher-weight children and they are open for public comment until January 16. In
Submitted. Ooof I just went off on #6. I am living proof that this does not work and if your end goal is less fat adults, it doesn't work to try to make kids lose weight--let alone if you actually stop to look at health, the supposed priority.
Something I found interesting, looking at the current (2000) growth charts, is that I would not have been subject to these recommendations if I were a child today. My father meticulously tracked my height and weight against 70's era growth charts. I was always in the 99th percentile for weight for my height. No BMI in the 70s and there were charts for fast and slow growers. I guess kids are uniform these days (/s). Fat was still labeled as bad, though.
I remember what I weighed in say, 6th grade, as well as my unhealthy desire to not exceed a certain weight. Obviously that failed. But when I compare my age and weight as a child to the 2000 charts, I would be in the 90th percentile. If their interventions are for 95th percentile and above, today they wouldn't include me as a subject.
I'm sure I'd still be told to lose weight. To not get bigger. But it makes no sense to me that my personal health risk--which is how the weight-loss recommendation is always framed today--is somehow dependent on the size of the rest of the population. To me, this clearly points to A) at the population level, human body size is a normal (in the statistical sense) distribution. There will always be an average as well as tails on both the high and low end. No intervention will change that. And B: overall changes in population-level body size are due to population-level effects--hormone disruption, weight stigma, increases in dieting, other stressors, etc. "Cures," if they must be implemented, have to target those population-level causes. Not individuals.
I'd like to include this in a comment, but I have concerns that the people in charge of the recommendations would take it the opposite lesson. That they're not doing ENOUGH to target fat people and the cutoffs for inclusion need to be MORE inclusive.
Submitted. Ooof I just went off on #6. I am living proof that this does not work and if your end goal is less fat adults, it doesn't work to try to make kids lose weight--let alone if you actually stop to look at health, the supposed priority.
I definitely want to comment on these guidelines.
Something I found interesting, looking at the current (2000) growth charts, is that I would not have been subject to these recommendations if I were a child today. My father meticulously tracked my height and weight against 70's era growth charts. I was always in the 99th percentile for weight for my height. No BMI in the 70s and there were charts for fast and slow growers. I guess kids are uniform these days (/s). Fat was still labeled as bad, though.
I remember what I weighed in say, 6th grade, as well as my unhealthy desire to not exceed a certain weight. Obviously that failed. But when I compare my age and weight as a child to the 2000 charts, I would be in the 90th percentile. If their interventions are for 95th percentile and above, today they wouldn't include me as a subject.
I'm sure I'd still be told to lose weight. To not get bigger. But it makes no sense to me that my personal health risk--which is how the weight-loss recommendation is always framed today--is somehow dependent on the size of the rest of the population. To me, this clearly points to A) at the population level, human body size is a normal (in the statistical sense) distribution. There will always be an average as well as tails on both the high and low end. No intervention will change that. And B: overall changes in population-level body size are due to population-level effects--hormone disruption, weight stigma, increases in dieting, other stressors, etc. "Cures," if they must be implemented, have to target those population-level causes. Not individuals.
I'd like to include this in a comment, but I have concerns that the people in charge of the recommendations would take it the opposite lesson. That they're not doing ENOUGH to target fat people and the cutoffs for inclusion need to be MORE inclusive.