This evening I watched the Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme about Dana, the 8 year old who is described as an anorexic.

Much was made, and rightly so, of the fact that younger and younger children are getting caught up in the dieting lunacy that looms so large in the thoughts of so many people, particularly young females, these days.

See http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/cutting_edge/dana/index.html

Efforts were made to pin down just what had turned Dana from being a healthy little girl into one obsessed with the determination to lose weight, come what might. Her mother thought it was probably several factors that came together, and mentioned one as being that Dana had taken to watching a weight loss channel on TV.

It's easy to think of other likely factors - the witless obsession with dieting in most glossy magazines, the unnaturally slim/thin models pictured in the magazines, the dieting junk that comprises a lot of the 'food' sold in supermarkets and elsewhere.

It's all deplorable: that healthy children and young people (and older people) spend so much of their waking hours consumed with thoughts about how to avoid eating, when they should be getting on with living their lives...

Sadly, the general consciousness has been conditioned and perverted for decades by foolish doctors claiming, with no evidence to back up their claims, that people become overweight/obese by 'overeating' and can only reduce their excess weight by undereating/'slimming'/restricting calories and eating low calorie food, and low-fat perversions of food, e.g. ghastly skimmed milk...)o:

It is blindingly obvious that the cause of overweight is not overeating, because slim people often eat loads more food/fat/sugar/calories than fat people do, and never gain an ounce despite taking very little exercise.

In fact it is fluid retention/sodium retention/salt sensitivity/water retention that causes people to be overweight, and this is in turn often caused by drugs that doctors have prescribed in ignorance of some of their serious side-effects.

The medical profession needs to own up to the terrible harm it is doing and has for decades been doing to its innocent patients, and at long last tell the truth about Obesity and the Salt Connection. This would liberate the young people and others who have got trapped on the dieting treadmill whether as overweight so-called over-eaters or overweight binge-eaters or bulimics, or underweight anorexics. Then no-one would feel pressured to eat less food than their body requires, thereby becoming ill in mind and body and spirit, and wasting the only life they have...)o:

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION