Parents are being advised against putting ham sandwiches into children's lunchboxes

Parents are being advised against putting ham sandwiches into children's lunchboxes in this BBC report. Other cured, salted, smoked and processed meats are also advised against. The reason given (by the World Cancer Research Fund) is that these meats increase the risk of bowel cancer in later life.

I agree with the WCRF that these meats are not good for children. Salty food, in particular, is not good for children. As well as increasing the risk of bowel cancer (and most other cancers too) it is the cause of child obesity. Unfortunately the Food Standards Agency says it is OK to give children cured, salted, smoked and processed meats occasionally. - Well it's not OK - not if you want your children to be as healthy as possible, and also to avoid becoming overweight.

Salt, of course, could properly be regarded as a carcinogen.

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

FAT RETENTION

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

The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Vulnerable groups

And see Sodium in foods

Susan Greenfield on Radio 5: Simon Mayo Programme

I've been listening this afternoon to Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford University professor, on Simon Mayo's Radio 5 programme. And that means I've just heard her give wrong information about what causes obesity. And that's a great shame, because she's known as a scientist and she's very influential.

I went to a talk she gave about ten years ago and I made a point of speaking to her afterwards and showed her photos of me from 1997: photos in which I was extremely fat as a consequence of taking prescribed HRT. She could see that I had lost a great deal of weight (51 pounds, in fact) since then and was surprised to learn that I had done this by drastically reducing my sodium intake, not by dieting.

She was in a bit of a rush and asked me to write to her as she was very interested. This I did, writing to her at the Royal Institution, in her capacity as Director there. I explained that blood volume increased markedly with obesity. We exchanged a few letters but the correspondence was disappointing to me, as I had hoped she would pursue the matter of sodium retention and water retention as causing obesity, rather than overeating, and sodium reduction for reducing excess weight, rather than eating fewer calories or less fat.

I gained from that correspondence the very strong impression that she was reluctant to consider prescription drugs and the medical profession and misinformation from them as blameworthy in regard to people becoming obese. I believe she was reluctant to criticise medics.

The statement of purpose of the Royal Institution when it started in 1799 was: "The application of science to the common purposes of life." As such, clearing up the misinformation and spreading the truth about obesity and how it can best be prevented/reduced would admirably accord with that purpose.

Sadly, Baroness Greenfield gave the same misinformation today that we commonly hear, as she spoke of eating too much being the cause of overweight. - It isn't, and there is no evidence to support her assertion. - I'm very surprised that ten years on from our letters she appears to have failed to investigate the connection between obesity and salt sensitivity.

Happily, when I wrote to Professor Sir Richard Doll, then Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, in 2001, he wrote back agreeing with what I had written about obesity problems caused by poor prescribing and indicating that these could be lessened by diuretics and/or eating less salt/sodium, a fact I had already deduced. He wrote that all doctors should know this.

Obesity is not caused by overeating; it is caused by salt sensitivity/fluid retention in vulnerable people. These include children. - See Vulnerable groups

When people whose blood vessels are weaker than the norm eat salt, the result is weight gain and obesity (because of excess sodium and water held in the blood vessels and elsewhere). This condition is also known as sodium retention, water retention, fluid retention, salt sensitivity or oedema. If these people reduce their salt intake they lose some of the excess sodium and water, and so lose weight, and if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables they lose weight faster, because the potassium in the fruit and vegetables displaces some of the excess sodium from the body.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Children's clothes sizes are to be changed to cope with a generation of bulging waistlines.

Children's clothes sizes to be changed to cope with obesity epidemic
article in the Sunday Telegraph

Extract:

"High street retailers plan to draw up new sizes, in response to the growing number of overweight and obese children.

Shops including Next, Asda and Monsoon are measuring 6,000 boys and girls amid an obesity epidemic which means one in three British children is now classed as overweight.

Manufacturers will use the results of the survey, using high-tech scanners, to decide how far to increase waist sizes and other measurements to allow for the expanding bulk of the average child. Most companies currently rely on statistics on children’s sizes that were published in 1990, as the obesity epidemic was just beginning.

Asda, which sells the most children’s clothing in Britain through its George brand, said it wanted to respond to the demands of its customers."

When children become fat it is essentially because they are eating salty food. Children are especially vulnerable to salt because of their small size and small blood volume, and because their blood vessels are weaker than those of adults. Salt, and the water it attracts to it, can more easily distend weak blood vessels than fully mature ones. The resulting increase in blood volume and other fluid retention results in weight gain, as well as higher blood pressure and many other undesirable consequences. The smaller the child, the less salt they should have - and a baby, of course, should have no salt at all. - Babies can die if they are fed salty food.

Because children have much smaller bodies than adults it would be best if they had no more than half as much salt as adults. Most children, however, have much more than this because they eat so many snacks and instant foods. Just one cheeseburger, for instance, contains almost double the recommended daily salt maximum for children. There are high amounts of salt in packet soups, instant noodles, ketchup and sauces, sausages, burgers, crisps and savoury snacks. Fat children will lose weight fast if they eat less salt. And even faster still if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and unsalted vegetables, because these are rich in potassium, which helps to displace sodium from the body. Overweight children should not be put on a diet; dieting is harmful and unnecessary and does not usually result in weight loss. Once children start dieting it is often the beginning of a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and increasing weight and ill-health.

Unfortunately bread contains a lot of salt and most families eat quite a lot of bread because of using it for sandwiches in packed lunches, and for toast, etc. Because of its high salt content bread is not a healthy food for little children or for anyone who is overweight. Some bread manufacturers have lowered the salt content of certain loaves, but most bread still usually contains 0.5g or more of sodium per 100g. This is too much. - Always check on the packet; look for the lowest sodium content.

Cheese is often recommended as being good for children because it contains calcium, but cheese is not really good for children because it has a high salt content. So don't give them a lot of it. Children can get plenty of calcium by drinking milk and by eating yogurt (but avoid the sort of yogurt that has lots of chemical additives).

Children and Obesity

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, hunger 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

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Childhood obesity is set before the age of five...

Obesity 'set before age of five'
article on the news pages of the BBC website

Extract:

"The EarlyBird Diabetes study of 233 children from birth to puberty is being published in the journal Pediatrics.

One in four children aged four to five in England are overweight, latest figures show.

Disease 'of our time'

At birth, the children in the study were of similar weight to babies 25 years ago, but had gained more fat by puberty compared with children of the same age in the 1980s.

The bulk of this excess weight was gained before the children were five.

Weight at five years bore little relation to birth weight, but closely predicted weight at nine years old."

"Lead researcher Professor Terry Wilkin, of the Peninsula Medical School, Plymouth, said: "When they reach the age of five the die seems to be cast, at least until the age of puberty.

"What is causing it is very difficult to know."

He said there must be a factor now that was not there 25 years ago which is making today's children obese."

There are more factors than one. Here are the main ones:

1) Children these days eat far more salt and salty food than formerly. Human breast milk is not high in salt/sodium, so breast-feeding a baby for as long as possible helps to protect the baby from becoming overweight. The younger the baby or child, the more harm salt causes. I expect that 25 years ago a lower proportion of mothers of young babies went to work, and so possibly breast-feeding was continued for longer than today.

2) The advice about reducing obesity is wrong. And people are bombarded by this wrong advice. - Obesity is not reduced by eating less food/fat/calories, because obesity is not caused by greed or 'over-eating'. Obesity is caused by fluid retention, caused in turn by sodium retention, and can only be reduced by reducing the fluid retention and that is done mainly by reducing salt/sodium intake and eating plenty of food that is rich in potassium. Fruit and vegetables contain a lot of potassium. Potassium displaces some of the sodium, and the water that always accompanies it, from the body.

3) Sodium retention depletes the body of essential minerals, mainly calcium, magnesium and potassium, and this mineral loss has many adverse consequences - fat retention and bone weakening being the main ones.

4) Dieting increases body weight because it increases fluid retention.

5) Exercise does not result in weight loss, no matter how many people insist that it does.

6) There are far too many pharmaceutical drugs prescribed and taken, and many of these cause or exacerbate fluid retention.

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

Children and Obesity

And see Sodium in foods and

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I am very much opposed to the idea that fat children 'should be taken from parents and given stomach-stapling surgery'.

Exclusive: Fat children 'should be taken from parents and given stomach-stapling surgery'
Article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"Tam Fry, a member of the National Obesity Forum's board, will tell a key conference that young people who are overfed by their parents should be treated as victims of abuse, just as malnourished children are.

He will argue that authorities should take obese children away from their families and into care, and that those whose health is at risk should then undergo stomach-stapling operations.

Mr Fry said parents should be allowed to visit their overweight children in hospital, but they must first be "frisked" to ensure they are not trying to smuggle them junk food or fizzy drinks.

He admits his ideas are radical and that he will likely lose a debate on whether child obesity should be treated as a form of abuse, to be held at the forum's annual conference on Tuesday.

But Mr Fry insists Britain's obesity epidemic poses such a risk to public health, with the overweight likely to suffer from heart disease and diabetes, that drastic action must be taken."

This guy is so dangerously ignorant of the facts about weight gain and weight loss, especially with regard to child obesity, that I believe he poses a threat to the health of overweight children and should at the very least be removed from the board of the National Obesity Forum. - If his suggestion were to be acted upon, this would be very harmful to the children chosen to endure the stomach-stapling operations.

Here are some FACTS about obesity:

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Children and Obesity

vulnerable groups

See Sodium in foods

A study of more than 3,000 children shows that those who had a gene were less likely to feel "full" than their classmates. - False conclusions drawn.

Obesity gene 'increases appetite'
Article (about child obesity) in the Telegraph. - Here is the concluding paragraph:

""It is not simply the case that people who carry the risky variant of this gene automatically become overweight – but they are more susceptible to overeating. This makes them significantly more vulnerable to the modern environment which confronts all of us with large portion sizes and limitless opportunities to eat." "

I'm very sceptical about most gene research, including this research, led by Professor Jane Wardle, from University College London. - No doubt the actual findings are correct, but it's the unwarranted extrapolation - the conclusions/explanations/dodgy reasoning - that debases any claim to be good science...)o:

The genes in question won't have just suddenly evolved, will they? - But obesity and in particular, child obesity, are very recent. - But 'overeating' is not a recent phenomenon. And, unfortunately for Prof Wardle's 'reasoning', there is no research to back up her basic assumption that it is overeating that causes obesity. - Since the premise of her argument is false, so also must be her conclusion.

In addition, it should be remembered that heavier children need more calories than lighter children - to carry their heavier body around and to keep their larger body warm, so when they eat more than the lighter children, they are not necessarily overeating anyway...(o: - They are responding to their bodies' greater calorie requirements - what we might call their natural hunger/appetite.

You can read about the causes of obesity on my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ (the site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information) and in particular about child obesity on this page - http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/children.html

If you are overweight/obese and want to lose weight, you can do it easily and safely. - Read these pages to see how:

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, angina, 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!