What are the underlying diseases and/or factors that lead to extreme obesity in young kids?
A kid in my grandson’s class is severely debilitated by his weight to the point of not being able to walk properly. I suspect that there may be intellectual issues as well, but not sure.
I know of Prader Willy syndrome, but if this kiddie has it, it’s clear there his carers aren’t able to follow through with the recommendations of the medical team.
Is there any other disease that results in extreme obesity?
Most studies seem to concentrate on the effects rather than the causes, but in the end, I suspect that behind all the verbiage, there is a single cause for the vast majority of obese adults and children.
The message is simple - eat less, (or better or both) exercise more. Children usually copy their parents, at least until their teenage years when they often flip, so those fat kids with their unhealthy lifestyles are frequently the result of fat parents with unhealthy lifestyles.
The op isn’t asking about garden variety obesity but early onset childhood morbid obesity and any potential identifiable genetic and syndrome forms. They are uncommon but exist, some associated with developmental delays and/or various organ abnormalities. The mentioned Prader-Willi Syndrome is the most well known and stopping these kids from overeating is extremely difficult. There are dozens of others, e.g. Bardet-Biedl, and some caused by certain receptor defects. Again though these are very uncommon entities.
Most childhood morbid obesity is similar to adult morbid obesity. The confluence of polygenic and epigenetic predisposition and an obesogenic environment (which includes but is not exclusively the home).
I will forever have burned in my brain the images I saw inside an Applebee’s restaurant 6 or 7 years ago. The scene featured 3 actors, all female and all morbidly obese. However, one of those three obese females was.a very young girl, probably no more than 8 years old. The waitresses came to take their “drink” orders and both the older (early-mid 40s) women got cocktails of some sort and the little girl got a double fudge brownie cookies and cream root beer float. I was sitting right across from them so i was hearing everying.
My real shock and horror came however, when i saw her pre-dinner “BEVERAGE” brought to their table. It was the size of a freaking fish bowl! It probably had several ounces of root beer in it but from my vantage point all i could see were desserts stacked on top of decadence. It looked like a.big bowl of vanilla ice cream had been been totally encircled with big huge brownies, glued together by ounces of hot fudge, and it was all covered in like a whole bottle of Reddi-Whip.
Keep in mind, this is BEFORE THE MEAL!!! This wasnt even dessert! This was her beverage! When it came time to order, the mom ordered for the girl (the girl had ordered her own debauchery in a fish bowl not this) and ordered her sweet honey boo boo a bacon cheeseburger the size of her head (which was not insubstantial) and a plate of french fries.
By the end of our meal, i had half a mind to get up and kidnap that poor child and pull her away from that horrible mother of hers while she still had time left. While there may and probably were many discrete factors that shaped this kid’s obesity so early in life, one thing was viscerally clear: the dysfunction of the mother and the self-destructive habits she learned as a young person were clearly being imprinted in her daughter.
She was sentencing her daughter to a lifetime of poor habits and body image and making it that much harder to later learn skillls necessary to confront and tackle her likely mutifaceted reasons for struggles with weight irrespective of anything else. But not only was she not helping her daughter learn how to address her weight struggles in a body-positive and healthy manner, before any of that she helped instill the very dysfunction that would necessitate that later need to address.
This was my unnecessarily long-winded, overly verbose way of saying the harmful lifelong habits, or just the overall paucity of effective life skills that are so insidious in the vicious circle of sick leading the sick (as seen in many dysfunctional and maladaptive families.) is at least part of the equation in the morbid obesity seen in. someyoung children.
I rarely interfere with anyone’s parenting, but when I see a parent trying to force food on their chid, I will go off on them. Forcing food on a child who is not hungry teaches them to eat when they are not hungry. I believe this is a leading cause of childhood obesity, and is a form of child abuse.
I blame McDonalds. I’m a food fetisher. I get on something and can’t help but want it (corndogs!) so I have sympathy for kids who lack knowledge and forethought. I totally get it. They can’t help it. It’s up to parents to limit trips to fast food joints. And cut out the dang soda. That stuff is so bad.
If you buy fruit and not brownies, guess what they’ll eat?
I know it’s hard.
Is this something that you actually see? Ever? I’m not disbelieving you I just don’t think i can recall ever being in any food serving area and witnessing a parent force feeding their child McNuggets. Or anything. But i admit to spending a certain number of years worth of my life in public in an altered state of mind. Coulda missed something. Wont lie.
Or do you mean something more nuanced than stuffing Whoppers violently down a small child’s throat? If so, how do you come to the conclusion that the parent is attempting to force feed their kids?
I’ve seen children put down their food and start to leave the table, only to have their parent say “Don’t you want some more.” When the child says “No” parent says “Well, try and finish it.”
The child knows when they’ve had enough to eat. Nobody should make a child eat when they are not hungry.
I’ve found, in my life that interference in someones private business is frought with danger. So, I don’t do it.
I’ve seen the odd parent encouraging a kid to quit playing and eat. I did that with my kids.
I have never seen anyone force food in a kids mouth. Ever.
I admit I don’t go into many fast-food places anymore. Is this a new thing?
Another one is food as reward/pacifier/painkiller. Kid is sad? Donut. Kid is worried because he can’t remember his lessons? Donut. Kid is tired? Donut. Kid now weighs twice as much as his classmates and the teacher is worried? Donut (for the kid, not the teacher).
I’ve seen it all my life. My parents didn’t get that far but they did the “you’re not leaving the table until you eat what’s been put in front of you” bit and the “you’re not eating anything else until you eat that” bit. That certain foods happened to actually make me and 1.Bro sick was just wrongheadedness on our part (in my case it’s mainly a matter of “I can’t stand eating goop”, in his it was having swallowed a plastic piece which eventually came up eight years later).
Well, parents know their children, there might actually be some good parenting going on. We know our kid doesn’t eat breakfast…maybe gulps some tea and has one slice of bread, his preference. Has some food at school not much.
Then after school, he may grab a snack and not feel hungry for dinner…but that’s because he gets constipated at dinner time (yeah tedious). Then he does this thing, comes back, and eats as much as he can. THEN, after 8PM, he gets ravenous. At this point he finishes up his supper, if there’s anything left, and has another snack. Sometimes he even comes downstairs at 11PM to get more food.
Long story short, his eating habits and timing are so out of step with us adults, our attempts to try to steer him to eat his “growing food” may seem, to an outsider, to be strange…
Who are you to stick your busybody self in other people’s personal affairs that you are utterly uninformed about and make knee jerk reactions to as if you, a totally ignorant plebe in regards to the goings on of the families you encounter, are somehow able to devine through your inscrutable powers what the background information is of the situation that you burst into. Gawddamn i cant believe the jaw dropping gall of self righteous busybodies who feel the need to pay so much attention to how strangers behave. And i dont even have kids! I hope you never actually did confront a parent in such a circumstance. Just for simple decency’s sake. If i was a parent i would need to take my child and immediately leave the vicinity. For the sake of my good standing with the legal system Don’t assume u know a fucking thing about strangers personal circumstances or motives. But shit, if you’ve made it this far in life and you’re committing these kinds of unforced errors, geesh, its a lost cause.
Oh, I did the ‘clean your plate’ routine. Mainly because they grabbed too big a helping. That taught them to quit grabbing more than they could eat. It took about 2 times and they learned. The lil’wrekker was a picky eater. I spent way too much time coercing and urging. A pediatric nurse told me once that very few/not any children in OUR circumstance die of starvation. Her advice was to quit fretting over it. I eased up. Dinnertime stress eased up and she started eating better.
I don’t think I ever had a problem with my children at a restuarant about eating. Those were special occasions. They wanted to be there, choose their favorites and ate it. And since I was driving and paying I could control it.
ETA, none of my children are obese.
Ambivalid, that is far over the line of what is acceptable in GQ. If you have a problem with another poster, take it to the Pit. This is an official Warning.
Thanks DSeid, yeah this isn’t just a chubby kid: he is so severely overweight that at age 9 or 10, it impacts on his mobility. This poor kid isn’t a victim of a poor diet alone, there is definitely some other pathology at play.
