The Top Five Foods Causing Kids to Pack on the Pounds
15/11/2004 9:17:39 AM
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No one culprit can be blamed for childhood obesity, but certain foods are definitely helping everyone put on extra weight.

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Making Movin' Fun, in Obesity Special

No one culprit can be blamed for childhood obesity, but certain foods are definitely helping everyone put on extra weight.

Excerpted from Winning the Food Fight. Copyright © 2003 by Dr. Joey Shulman. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This book is available at all book stores, online retailers and from the Wiley Web site at www.wiley.ca, or call 1-800-567-4797.

Where Have We Gone Wrong?

While it is true that there is no single dietary culprit responsible for childhood obesity, there are certain foods in our grocery stores that are causing kids (and adults!) to unknowingly pack on extra pounds. The shift from whole to refined and processed foods is definitely one of the biggest contributors to the problem. Stripping a natural grain of its fiber, adding refined sugars, and adding chemicals such as MSG, which stimulate the brain to eat more and more, is a one-way ticket to weight gain for most. Although the effects of refined foods and sugars have been reviewed in the previous chapters, the following is a summary of the top five foods that are causing the epidemic of obesity in kids:

1. White, refined flour products: bread, bagels, cereals, muffins, crackers, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, and granola bars

2. White sugar: soda, candy, cookies, cakes, gum, and ketchup

3. Hydrogenated and/or partially hydrogenated fat: margarine, refined vegetable oils, chips, most microwave popcorn, cookies

4. Processed fast foods: luncheon meats, french fries, burgers, microwave pizza

5. Saturated fat: cheese, hot dogs, hamburgers, luncheon meats

As you now know, white refined flour and sugar will overtrigger the release of the hormone insulin, secreted by the pancreas. When excess insulin is secreted because of faulty food choices, it is stored as fat. With the perpetual intake of highly refined foods, which are the mainstay of an average child's diet, cell receptors become insensitive to the amount of insulin released. In order to compensate for the insulin insensitivity, the body will secrete more and more insulin to deal with the glucose (sugar) from the food. As a general rule, more insulin = more fat storage. In order to conceptualize the amount of insulin secreted by a healthy body versus a body that has become insulin insensitive, consider the following statistic by one of the world's foremost authorities in nutritional and natural medicine, Dr. Michael Murray: "It is estimated that healthy individuals secrete approximately 31 units of insulin daily, while the obese type II diabetic secretes an average of 114 units daily."

The state of insulin insensitivity is the first step toward the development of obesity and Type II diabetes. Luckily, this process can be halted and even reversed in children when proper dietary guidelines are introduced.

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If only they had not added that last group. Cheese is a problem? Bah, cheese iis great for you. I suggest it is the top four causing the problem. Eliminate excess carbs and that cheese is fine.

Brobin

Actually, the hot dogs and luncheon meats belong in group 4. And the hamburgers are fine if they are bunless, but the assumption is not. And I definitely agree with you on the cheese. Five is a bust.

Group 5 IS a problem ... if those foods are consumed along with the foods in the first four groups.

Cheers,


Malcolm

I run a store that caters half to kids and half to adults. Most of the kids we sell to are quite athletic, but they gorge out on pizza (the local joints have $5 pizzas right after school), burgers with 3 buns (!!!), and a ton of fries. All of them say the same thing I said when I was a teen: "I can eat all I want and not gain a pound." Unfortunately, I learned at the age of 25 that things can change, over night. I try to tell them that the reason they feel so tired after gulping down a pizza is a carb crash, but I guess we all made that mistake.

You can't blame them -- would you rather have a $5 pizza with an energy rush, or a $7 dinner with meat and some veggies?

Not to side track the thread... but I'm jealous of all those kids who ate $5 pizzas and burgers with 3 buns and fries and never gained weight and got a sugar rush from it .
I was born with the metabolism of a 35 year old
Never got to enjoy sugar rushes, never got to enjoy good metabolism... went straight to lethargy, PCOS, hypoglycemia ravenous hunger and obesity in the teens.
My cousin is like that, though. Tall and willowy, she can out eat anyone and nothing bad happens... no ravenous hunger and shakiness after, seemlessly eats a normal amount of food to compensate later, etc. So so lucky. If only I could know what freedom and fun that must feel like .

Haha. I can actually eat regular pizza on occasion. Being in Maintenance still means being careful, but I can do upwards of 150 net carbs a day. This doesn't mean entire pizzas, but it does give me a little room for parties and events and such (I can NEVER do wedding or birthday cake, holy carb crash). The sugar high to me is absolutely awful though. It is not missed.

What does a sugar high feel like to you? I don't recall feeling "high" from it. I was just tired all the time. I remember having headaches often too.
I think I just got the crash but missed out on the high part lol.

I am also maintaining and do allow for small pieces of celebration cake or bites of cookies and tastes of icecream etc... but I mean just to be able to eat as much as you want and not worry about your body craping out on you, on making you so hungry that you eat too much, that you gain weight, that your endocrine system just gets totally out of wack... that's what I'm jealous of as I started getting obese around 9 years old (and was always overweight) .

I was always skinny as a kid (always heard "you should eat more"). Then at 25 I gained everything I should have gained over my life, in about 6 months

A sugar high isn't like a caffeine or nicotine high (yes I do both) at all. Instead its more of a feeling of strong energy followed by the knowledge that you can just continue eating. It is so subtle that it makes complete sense to me why people can binge-eat: you feel like you can't stop and don't want to stop.

The carb crash comes so quickly afterwards, though. 30 minutes of cloud 9, 2 hours of being tired. The last time I had a "normal" pizza or whatever I had the sugar high and carb crash so fast that it amazed me -- and caused me to realize that my WOE is the only one for me.

For me, a sugar high feels like being mildly drunk and euphoric. I have for many years known that I could get drunk on coconut cream pie. For about fifteen minutes, I can feel my blood coursing through my temples. Feels wonderful. But, guess what happens after about half an hour? I become very very hungry. Reading DANDR really hit home for me, because it explained why I had this happen.

My son lives with his dad and his dad's g/f and another child. My son tells me that the other child, which is younger than he, is nearly 2 times larger than my son (12 yr). He said to me, "they put Marcus on a diet."

I asked him why this 10 yr old was on a diet..
My son remarked, "He can't fit in the theatre seats anymore, and they feed him nothing but Burger King."

Fortunately, I took my son, over the summer, to see Super Size Me.. and I think that changed his way of thinking..... and now understands why my food is "clean."

My 2 older boys (15 and 13) saw SuperSize Me and now they wouldn't go to McD's if somebody paid them to Not that they went that often anyway...

I agree that soda is a top contender - if I let them, my boys (all three of them - the youngest is 7) would drink it from morning to night and never anything else. It's pure sugar and taking the place of water for almost every kid I see on the street. I see a lot of teenagers walking down the road chugging out of a 2 liter (1/2 gallon) bottle all to themselves!!

Video games and TV -- sitting around too much, eating out of boredom and stress. Today's kids have a lot of pressure coming at them from all sides and sometimes use food to self-medicate. That was my problem as an adult - why not kids, too? Parents working too much or single-parent homes and no time to cook/shop/prepare meals. Kids signed up for everything under the sun and there's no time between piano practice and soccer to go home for a healthy home-cooked meal - hit the drive thru.... All of these are factors, IMO.

I see... so it's subtle feeling of high activity and it encourages over eating?
Maybe that's why I ate so much?

My memories of sugar involve feeling starving all the time, eating all the time and never feeling satisfied, depression, occasional tooth & head aches, moodiness, feeling scared to be away from food because I might "get those feelings" (what i now realize was probably a sugar crash)... my intake of food was limited only by its availability, my hunger and satiety signals didn't work at all. I mean, physically I could feel stuffed, but the signals which connected that feeling with fullness just didn't work. Oh yea, and lets not forget the PCOS symptoms either. I was infertile.

My endocrine system was a muddy swamp.

The only sensation I can connect to what might be a sugar high is this feeling... hard to explain I wouldn't call it high energy, but it felt like I was taking in a lot of oxygen. A rush, not of energy (I never felt energetic) but of sensation. It felt "too much". I had forgotten it, but I remembered it when I tasted brownies (I connected the taste to that feeling).

If that was the case, why was I always underweight? My taste in food covered most of what is on that list and my parents were always worried that I was too underweight(about 20 pounds).

i started gaining weight when I was 8-9. I was always the fat kid in every class from there on out. Everyday I would go to the corner store to get my daily ration of doritos and Dr. Pepper (shudder). I can really not ever remember being a "normal" weight...the only sugar high I ever got was a feeling of hyperactivity for about an hour after my meals. I once got a report card from my school teacher that I had frequent "attacks of the sillies". These, of course occured mysteriously after lunch! ...yes it is similar to caffiene in that it gives you a false boost, I can never recall it feeling truly good, even if I might of been laughing or whatever. Sugar just drives me plain nuts....or maybe just to eating nuts.

Y'know..... I used to keep diet iced tea, and diet sprite, and all those diet rite soda's in the house.. and I never lost a lb. Now I think I know why..

Now when my son comes over, and brings his friends, and they look in the fridge for "something to drink," he says to his friends, "all we have is boring water." hahahahahahahahahaa!!!!!