Estimation of Obesity
7 May, 08 | by Ian Wacogne
When eighty healthcare professionals were asked to look at photographs and assign one of six categories from underweight to obesity in 33 children, they were poor at assessment, and tended to underestimate overweight conditions. Here.
Which leads me to the conclusion that we all need to plot on BMI charts to see if a child is overweight/obese.
And that leads me to feeling desperate that there’s nothing (proven) we can actually do about it. (The latest Avon Cohort report emphasises the ’stuck in a rut’ of childhood obesity is fixed by entry to primary school.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17912267
Lazy Town might be a start (if my children are in any way representative of anyone else’s — they watch, inactive for 17 minutes then start dancing/jumping around etc and frequently ask for ’sports candy’ == apple as a snack (although that’s usually after a request for chocolate has been turned down) … but it’s not them that determine what they eat and how often they have high-energy density snacks).
The Glugs (tm?) may be another approach. (But they’re not on prime-time C5 Milkshake … yet) http://www.harlowprinting.co.uk/glugs_front.htm
But what do I do now, with my 16-18 year olds post HD treatment who have BMIs of 32+ (and rising).
bphillips
May 13th, 2008 at 10:12 am
A colleague tells me a salutary story of a girl he’d been treating for obesity. It came to her last clinic visit before she went to an adult service. She’d not realised beforehand she wasn’t going to see her much loved doctor again, so rummaged around in her school bag to find a gift she could give him. She emerged with a one kilogram bar of chocolate she just happened to have with her.
Do people have easy access to BMI charts? I’ve got some I pinched off a stand at York conference a few years back and which I jealously guard.
And can you make any difference? Well… Here this paper follows the trend of demonstrating that intensive programs can result in sustained improvements. Not big improvements, and not yet sustained for that long but… Well, you get the idea.
iwacogne
May 14th, 2008 at 8:35 pm