How to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity and disease...

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my blog. Your children will die younger than you will. That's a pretty sobering thought. And that's what we can look forward to if we follow the same habits of the last 30 years and we don't work together to overcome our toxic food environment. I have a friend and a colleague, Dr. David Ludwig, who's an MD and PhD. He's a professor at Harvard Medical School. He's the director of the OWL Program, which is often weight for life life at the Children's Hospital in Boston. And he has written an amazing new book. It's called Ending the Food Fight: A Guide youe Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food, Fake Food World. And it's really the new manifesto for providing a solution to our frightening epidemic of childhood obesity and disease. It's really a frightening thing we're facing. And he faces this problem square on. And he's facing it because we are seeing an unparalleled decline in our children's health. In one book, he tackles three main obstacles that face us in creating health for our children, and really for ourselves. First, he teaches us that we're losing the battle with our biology. We will always lose unless we learn how to balance our mind with our metabolism and eat real whole foods which balance our blood sugar, create weight loss without counting calories, without counting fat grams, without counting carbs, no deprivation, and it effortlessly works because we work with our bodies rather than against them. So this is the first thing he talks about. This ends the food fight within us. Secondly, he teaches us how to create a family environment that supports our children with age-appropriate practical parenting ideas. Things that work with the child's psychological needs rather than against them. We're always fighting with our kids. This works with the kids. and that ends the food fight in the family. And thirdly, he encourages us to look at the elephant in the room, our completely toxic food and health environment. He calls on parents and communities to stand up for their children and demand that their schools, governments respond to this crisis by providing more physical activity in schools, creating playgrounds, community parks, providing healthy school lunches, which are based on nutritional science instead of industry profits, He tells us to ban ads on junk food for children and lots more. This is the kind of thing he talks about that will help us end the food fight in our community. Nothing less, I believe, will help solve this problem. Nothing less will stem the tsunami of obesity and disease facing our children. But before I go into telling you more about what Dr. Ludwig teaches us, let me tell you who he really is. Now, some of us are translators of science, sort of like me, but others are giants who see into the future, who do all the work in the laboratory, and who take courageous risks and ask questions despite enormous political and economic obstacles. Dr. Ludwig is that man. So in fact, he is an unsung hero. He's taught us about the effects of food on our bodies, particularly high glycemic foods. He's published over 70 scientific papers in top journals, things like New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association. And his work, in fact, is the basis of popular diets, things like the South Beach Diet, Sugar Busters, and I counted heavily on his research for my book, Ultra Metabolism. And for the first time, he speaks out in public to teach us what he's learned in a way that everyone can access. And up till now, this work has just been available in scientific journals. So I can tell you, he's a very serious man and he is committed to changing our world and our children's health. I'm going to just give you a few highlights that he talks about in his book, Ending the Food Fight. He says, why are we in trouble? Well, he says it's pretty scary, so don't be scared off by this, but we have to face this. It's frightening and it's serious. He says, the percentage of overweight children ages 6 to 11 has doubled in the last 25 years. The percentage of overweight teens has tripled, and one in three children is overweight today. That's 30 million children, and by 2010, it's going to be, it's predicted that one in two children are half of all children will be overweight. That is totally unacceptable. Pediatricians actually now treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and adult onset, right, or type 2 diabetes, and heart attacks, and sleep apnea in children. These are adult diseases. By the time overweight children reach their 20s, they can look forward to diseases that are affecting people in their 60s and 70s normally. Things like heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, even amputations from diabetes. This is happening today. This isn't something in the future. This is actually happening today. Now, it also affects children's self-esteem. Overweight kids are discriminated against more than even kids in a wheelchair. A typical child also is bombarded by advertising promoting them to eat junk food. Each kid sees 10,000 junk food ads every year. And the foods they're eating are made by food chemists, and they're not grown by farmers. and that's why our life expectancy is declining for the first time in human history. So we need to really look at what's going on here seriously. I mean, Dr. Ludwick tells us that neighborhood playgrounds and school education and after school programs have declined and junk food vending machines are everywhere in schools. He did a study of 750 children from 10 to 15 year olds and found that kids who watch five hours of television or more a day compared to those who only watch two hours or less had a five-fold or 500% greater risk of being overweight. And 60% of all childhood obesity can be attributed to watching TV. For every hour of TV watched, your weight increases by six pounds. And I think this applies to adults too. In fact, I just got back from Israel this morning and I was stunned because they have large families over there, the religious families, and they have eight, ten children. I did not see one overweight children. And you know what they all have in common? None of them have television or computers in their home. None of them. And these kids, there wasn't one overweight kid. They were running around, playing, enjoying themselves. He tells us a few other things that are scary. He says soda intake has increased 500% since the 1950s and accounts for 10% of calories for the average teenager. He says 500 middle school children in one study They found the risk of becoming obese increased 60% for every additional serving of sugar-sweetened drinks that they drank every day. This is frightening statistics. This is the research that Dr. Ludwig has done. He also found that in a study of 3,000 children over 15 years, those who had fast food twice a week or more gained an extra 10 pounds. And you don't realize that one fast food meal can have as much calories as the body needs for the entire day. So what has Dr. Ludwig told us in his research about actually how the body works? Well, he said low-fat, low-calorie diets don't work. The government food pyramid is wrong and it works against our biology. He says our genes didn't change, the environment changed. And he also found in his research that low glycemic load diets, those are the ones which raise the blood sugar slowly, raise your insulin slowly, and do it less than other foods such as high sugar, refined carbohydrate diets with lots of flour products and white rice and potatoes and processed foods. He said that these low glycemic diets are very effective for long-term weight loss. And they do it without having to count calories, not counting fat grams, not counting carbs or any deprivation. And it does it by reducing hunger and naturally reducing your food intake. So eating this low glycemic diet, it actually lowers all the hormones that make us hungry and fat, and it works with our bodies rather than against it. So this is a very powerful scientific paradigm that you're not hearing about, and Dr. Ludwig paints this picture for us in bold detail. Now here's a few things he says we could actually do about the problem. First, eat high quality whole foods, which actually lower our hunger and support our metabolism. And actually this is the basis of my book, Ultra Metabolism. This is the research I used to help create the plan that I have outlined in Ultra Metabolism. And you want to eat real foods, right, as they came from nature, not fake foods that are made in the chemist lab, but real foods that grow on farms. And you can also follow Dr. Ludwig's eight principles of low glycemic eating. Those are on page 69 of his book. And he encourages us to play throughout the day and not focus on just structured exercise only, but have fun. He also tells us to turn off the TV. He gives us guidelines about age-appropriate parenting. He tells us to work with older children in special ways. And you can actually follow his nine-week program, which he developed at Harvard Medical School, and has been successful with thousands of patients. So I really encourage you to take control of your communities, your families, and your lives by using Dr. Ludwig's wisdom. And there's so many more jewels. I can't give you all the practical advice that he has in ending the food fight. There's a nine-week plan, there's this wise parenting advice, there's amazing recipes, weekly diaries, shopping lists, and great resources. So if you have children or you know anyone with children, you've got to get this book. You've got to read it, you've got to use it yourself or give it to your friends. It's the greatest gift that you can give yourself, your children and your community. And it's the wisest, clearest and most powerful tool we have to address our greatest health crisis, which is obesity in our children. And it's our greatest health crisis facing our families and our nation. So buy lots of copies, give them to your senators, give them to your congressmen, give them to your local school representatives and your local and state representatives in your government. The problem affects everyone, not just the children and they're victims of a toxic food environment. And Dr. Ludwig's work is our hope for a saner, healthier society. So thank you. This has been Dr. HarnarK-Hymen in his weekly blog.