Obese Kids Have Middle-Aged Arteries

Exercise alone is not sufficient for good health...a person can look "in shape" and yet still be throwing down unhealthy food in the pie hole. Look at some of the foods we as Americans eat on a daily basis...and we wonder why our bodies do not respond well? I am going to school for holistic nursing...I have been interested in the energy systems of the body and how these systems need to be kept fine-tuned to keep the organs of our bodies healthy. How we eat is a lot like how we fuel our vehicles. We would not think of putting a cup of muck in our fuel tank or the vehicle would not run and incur damage...the same goes for how we treat our bodies with foods we eat...if we put crap food into our bodies, we will not function properly and will incur damage. Notice, I did not say MAY incur damage...this is a definite. The strange thing is, we tend to treat our vehicles better than we treat our own bodies...this does not make sense. Exercise WITH a consistent healthy diet will yeild good results. Taijiquan and/or Qigong exercises are excellent for energy exercises for our bodies.

Let you're kids go outside and play. Less TV, Less video games.

More runnig, jumping, climbing...

Do we really need a study to tell us that excersize is better than being lazy?

I still can't believe that just about everyone has accepted BMI as an effective personal diagnostic tool.

Body Mass Index was NEVER intended to be a diagnostic tool, EVER! It is a STATISTICAL measure used to describe populations, not individuals. All it does is compare height to weight and then compare that to the rest of the human population. It will tend to completely misdiagnose athletes, weightlifters, and anyone else who puts on a degree of muscle tone, because muscle *weighs more than fat*.

I've lifted weights with a fair degree of regularity since I was about fifteen. I work out about an hour a day or so. The government considers me to be medically obese, however, due to the muscle tone I've put on over years of weight workouts. I get some fairly surprised reactions when I mention this to other people.

I'm not saying obesity isn't a major American problem, but when I see a Harvard-trained doctor make a diagnosis of someone they've never met based almost completely on BMI (I saw this in a men's magazine recently), it makes me think that scientific illiteracy is also a major American problem. I don't know what excuses people with advanced degrees to have such a poor understanding of the difference between diagnostic and statistical measures.

There is no evidence that says that obesity is good for anyone, let alone kids.
However, medical researchers need to do scientifically-sound studies to prove their case. Just studying arterial wall thickness in obese kids, and comparing to the values to some table does not suffice.
First, many of these experiments were not controlled by measuring arterial wall thickness in age-matched children with normal body mass index, by the same technique and investigator. Second, since these measurements were done after the kids were obese, it is not possible to know whether the children had the same arterial wall thickness before they were obese.
Either way, these are huge study design errors that decrease the meaning of the studies to near zero.
Again, I do not believe obesity is good. I am saying do valid studies to prove its problems.

Doesn't surprise me. This country is filled with lazy people whos diets consist of fast food, potato chips and "energy drinks". Its all good though, darwin will catch up to them.