Transcript

Sound Partners Report #3
Aired 9/15/03
DN=David Nicholas, CMU Public Radio News Director
RH=Dr. Roschelle Heuberger, a registered dietitian from Central Michigan University’s Human and Environmental Studies Department

Host Intro:
CMU Public Broadcasting has been involved in a grant-funded program titled, “Healthy Weight in Preschool Children.” Research was done earlier this year with daycare providers to assess their patterns and concerns regarding the eating habits and exercise for youngsters in Michigan. We will be reporting back on the findings of the efforts for improvements in 2004.

A website is providing information and links to a broad range of related topics; that site is www.healthyweightforkids.org. CMU Public Radio has leant its voice to the issue with an occasional series of reports on the topic; News Director David Nicholas continues the look at the question of “healthy weight…”

DN:
We are an image conscious society and this attention, some would call it obsession has extended to our youngest people. With that has come a growing problem with healthy weight in young children. The problem has been reflected in the battle against eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. It has also dramatically increased at the opposite end of the scale, childhood obesity. There are currently federal standards that measure children for healthy weight, called the body mass index. Categories derived from that scale are labeling children sometimes inaccurately when it comes to the question of healthy weight.

Dr. Roschelle Heuberger is on the faculty of the Department of Human and Environmental Studies at Central Michigan University. She says the mislabeling can lead to a series of problems for the child and his or her parents…

RH:
And again, children fall into these percentiles, but a lot of it does depend on how much muscle mass the child has. There are some children who will come up as being overweight or obese, when in actuality they are not. They just have an inordinate amount of muscle mass for their particular age and height, and muscle weighs more than fat. So sometimes you will get a situation where a child gets classified erroneously as a result of how much muscle they have on them.

DN:
So to the human eye, the naked eye, someone can be seen as overweight but be perfectly healthy.

RH:
That is correct.

DN:
Is the opposite true? Could someone be overweight and instead of thinking that that weight has come as a result of eating everything thing they need to, can they be overweight and yet still malnourished?

RH:
Absolutely.

DN:
What would be the difference, then between the two?

RH:
Malnourishment actually means poorly nourished. “Mal” coming from the Latin meaning “bad.” You can have someone with an incredibly bad diet in terms of how many vitamins and minerals they receive, how much calcium, how much iron they get. And in terms of their overall nutrition status, they can be quite malnourished, yet they receive way too much fat, way too many calories, and for that reason are depositing a lot of extra tissue without necessarily fulfilling their nutritional obligations, if you will. So if we think about the American diet, for example. We think about a lot of fast food that is deep-fried, has a lot of saturated fat in it, has a lot of calories to it, but is very poor nutritionally in terms of density of vitamins and minerals, which ultimately allow us to utilize the calories and to function normally because these elements or these vitamins are critical to our being able to burn other components. Being able to utilize the carbohydrates, the proteins, and the fats for energy. They are critical to cell function. So you can have somebody who is morbidly obese, but receives very little in the way of vitamins and minerals and other components that are critical to good health. It becomes a great challenge to try to increase nutrient density for children, especially, whose needs are somewhat higher in relation to how much they take in for growth and other things.

DN:
You talk too about a percentile that can be established for a child at a very young age and the benefit of maintaining that percentile as they grow older. If we reach a point where a condition of being overweight is determined based on this balance between the level of weight and the level of nutrition, should overweight children diet?

RH:
Dieting is not acceptable for children. I don’t even believe that dieting serves adults. And so for someone to come out and say that that child needs to be put on a diet, I believe is a very unsound practice clinically. Dieting has been associated over time with gross failure on the part of most adults who attempt to lose weight in that manner. What you need to teach children and what you need to do with a child that is over fat is increase the nutritional density of their diet and increase their physical activity, and just wait until their eating patterns and their exercise regimen normalizes. And once that is achieved then the likelihood is that they will build muscle mass and lose fat. So dieting is really a no-no.

Now talking about healthy eating practices with children brings a whole host of other difficulties. Children are very much influenced by the media. The media targets them with all kinds of programming aimed at getting them to eat things that are not necessarily nutritionally dense. That is a very big thing to overcome. Children want to be like their peers. It has been noted time and time again that very young children are very accepting of fruits and vegetables, for example. But as soon as they go out on the playground and they encounter other children who don’t like them, they come home and say, “Ew! I don’t want to eat this anymore.” So it is really something that is learned and you have to overcome these sorts of barriers, which is incredibly difficult for parents to do. The other issue is that unless the parent is willing to model appropriate behaviors, you‘re going to have very limited success in changing the child’s perceptions and eventually their whole eating pattern. The parent has to be willing to eat the fruits and vegetables. The parent has to be willing to model these kinds of good nutritional behaviors, good exercise behaviors, and without that, the rate of success is dramatically reduced.

Host Tag:
Dr. Roschelle Heuberger is on the faculty at Central Michigan University. She spoke with CMU Public Radio’s David Nicholas. The website for CMU Public Broadcasting’s project, “Healthy Weight in Preschool Children” is www.healthyweightforkids.org.