Healthy Eating, Eating Disorders and Children
A great article from "Mom please Help" on government's campaign to reduce child obesity and its detrimental effects on children's psychological well being. UK has the highest rate of child obesity in Western Europe.
According to BBC: "There has been a four-fold increase in the number of children and teenagers admitted to hospital for obesity-related conditions in the last decade, doctors in England and Wales warn." Furthermore, n 2009, nearly 4,000 young people needed hospital treatment for problems complicated by being overweight compared with just 872 in 2000. Rates of obesity surgery also went up, especially for teenage girls.
Another pandemic affecting UK's health services is eating disorders in Children. Dr Jane Morris, chairwoman of the Scottish Eating Disorder Interest Group, said children were obsessing about their diet because of drives to combat obesity.Figures reported in 2011 show that more than 2,000 children have received treatment for eating disorders in the past three years in UK.
Report in Guardian shows that:
Nearly 600 children under the age of 13 were treated in hospital in England, including 197 aged between five and nine. The figures from 35 NHS hospitals showed 98 were aged between five and seven at the time of treatment and 99 aged eight or nine.Almost 400 were between the ages of 10 and 12, with more than 1,500 between 13 and 15 years old.
(Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/01/children-eating-disorder-figures-alarm)
Dr Morris, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Royal Edinburgh hospital, said it was a ‘huge concern.’
She said: “We’ve had so many families say, all this [the eating disorder] started with the healthy eating lesson.
“Their child has come home from school and said, this food or that food was bad and she was only going to eat good food from now on.
(Retrieved from: http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2012/02/26/healthy-eating-campaigns-causing-anorexia/)
Are Governments healthy eating campaigns causing eating disorders in Children? Read below for an article by William:
Source: Mom Please Help
Here is a great article from William that really makes you wonder how much governments think things through. In 2006 the Australian Government launched a $6 million campaign to reduce Child obesity and the Australian Medical Association (AMA) welcomed the focus on kids' health.
The idea was to focus on junk food and get parents to stop the child from eating fast foods, sweets and other unhealthy foods. TV, radio and newspapers were running government sponsored ads to point out the dangers of these kinds of foods, with the idea to get kids eating more healthy foods.
This at the time seemed a very noble cause as overweight kids are a big problem in all western countries. The government was correct that for these overweight kids there was a great risk to their health from diseases such as diabetes, heart problems and high blood pressure etc, in later life.
What they did not factor in was the psychological effects on these overweight kids and may have inadvertently created a whole new generation of eating disorder victims. Kids were encouraged to start diet clubs at school and there have been
stories of kids being weighed at school, at times in front of the whole class. We learn of incidents of bullying and social isolation of larger children which is another anecdotal trigger for eating disorders.
What has now happened is a lot of these overweight kids are starting to be ostracized by their peers and so much pressure being placed on them that they are starting to suffer from stress and other psychological ailments, like anorexia and bulimia.
What the so call experts in the government ranks forgot was that the child brain is like a giant sponge and very plastic. It absorbs huge amounts of information forming neuronal pathways with the information that is deemed to be important.
So constant teasing and emotional abuse from other kids for being a bit overweight can have a devastating effect on the child and the way they see themselves, or to put it simply their body image.
This added to the fact that the so called perfect body type is the emaciated Hollywood stars and the super thin catwalk models they see in the media: it is easy for the plastic brain of the child to form a distorted view of reality.Even shows like Australian Idol and American Idol favor the slimmer better looking contestant, with the bigger contestant voted out of the show even if they are fantastic singers. They just don't fit that TV mode or what a modern singing idol should look like.
This is an extremely bad role model for the slightly overweight child or teenager
who watches these shows; it sends a lot of false messages to their brain.
The major problem that arises from all this negative bombardment on
the child about weight is the fact that it will be formed in a child brain and formed by child logic, e.g. eating food equals becoming fat, equals being teased, equals bad emotions. So the remedy is to stop eating, loose lots of weight and you will be accepted.
When these kids become adults this faulty distorted thinking will be a full blown case of an eating disorder and extremely difficult to treat because it was formed in the plastic brain of a child with child logic and emotions.
But luckily there have been major breakthroughs in the treatment of eating disorders using the fact that our brains remain plastic even into adulthood, it is call neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is a method where we are able to form new neuronal pathways by using a set of mental exercises built on new positive emotional input. Once these new pathways have been built and are used instead of the old destructive ones, the old pathways will loose their power: hence the eating disorder will disappear. Will this be easy for this new generation of eating disorder sufferers to do: no absolutely not. The problem as stated is the fact that these faulty neuronal pathways have been build in the child brain and will be extremely hard to shift.Unfortunately a lot of children will fail and suffer lifelong eating disorders, but luckily a lot of people will succeed using the neuroplasticity approach. Many more than will succeed with this new approach than the conventional treatment used today to treat eating disorders.
William Webster
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