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Optimal Weight for Life

Children’s in the news

by Tripp Underwood on August 25, 2011

Have you heard about the new kids’ book, “Maggie Goes on a Diet”? It’s basically a retelling of the age-old ugly ducking fable, but with a modern twist. In this reenactment, the duckling is a 14-year-old girl who goes on a diet, and with a little hard work goes from being an overweight, self-conscious kid to a star soccer player and the most popular girl in school.

The book may stress the importance of healthful eating and exercise, but many people are finding fault with the author’s emphasis on the thin = happy storyline, instead of focusing on the importance of health.

Among the critics is our own Dr. Claire, who was on New England Cable News this morning to talk about Maggie, childhood obesity and how to send kids the right message about health and weight.

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Food for thought: The war against childhood obesity

by Tripp Underwood on August 10, 2011

Daivd Ludwig, MD, PhD

For David Ludwig, MD, PhD, one of health’s most fundamental truths can be traced back to a 2,000-year-old quote from Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine: “Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food.”

It’s a simple but powerful philosophy, and when combined with current research in obesity prevention, it’s one of the cornerstones of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) Clinic. “Hippocrates was right, nutrition really is the foundation for health and well-being,” says Ludwig. “He understood that intuitively, without access to the modern science and technology.”

Founded by Ludwig in 1996, OWL is a multidisciplinary clinic with a staff that includes physicians, nurses, dietitians and experts in child behavior. With Ludwig at the helm, OWL has spent the past decade and a half researching childhood obesity while serving over 1,500 patients a year, making it one of the largest and most respected childhood obesity clinics in America. Now, thanks to a $7 million grant provided by the New Balance Foundation, Ludwig and his team will be able to expand their clinical research, patient care and community health programs. The newly created New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center will bring Ludwig’s message to even more children and communities struggling with weight issues.

Since he was 8 years old, Ludwig has been captivated by the inner workings of the human body. By the time he finished the fourth grade he had read every physiology book on the shelves of his local library.

That fascination stayed with him throughout his education. When he began his pediatric endocrinology fellowship at Children’s, he focused his studies on diet and weight, researching how brain function affects body size, as well as the role genetics plays in why some people become obese and others do not.

But with childhood obesity already reaching epidemic status by the mid-1990s, Ludwig felt a more preventive approach was needed to remedy the mounting health problems that overweight children would face in the future.

“Our genes, though important, haven’t caused the epidemic—so we need to look to the environment for the answers,” he says. Full story »

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Parade.com talks healthy eating

by Tripp Underwood on April 11, 2011

It’s no secret that most kids aren’t exactly crazy about healthy eating. Many growing taste buds prefer pizza to carrots, leaving plenty of parents and educators at a loss for how to get the children in their lives to eat better. From hip marketing campaigns to health food product placement— not too mention good, old-fashioned trickery— there are plenty of way to try to get kids to eat right, but there isn’t a sure fire method that’s proven to work.

To help parents in their quest for healthier kids, David Ludwig, MD, PhD, director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Optimal Weight for Life program, recently spoke with Parade magazine, offering practical advice on ways parents can drive home the importance of a well balanced diet. Here’s an excerpt:

“Young children are like ducks: They do what their parents do,” says Harvard endocrinologist Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston. If you eat junk food instead of fruits and vegetables, they will too.”

A University of Tennessee study reports that mothers usually refrain from offering babies foods they themselves dislike—so if you hate fava beans, chances are that your child has never tried them. Still, says Dr. Ludwig, it’s never too late to become a good role model. Explain to children that real foods—like fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, beans, fish and meat—come from nature. Dr. Ludwig recommends that obese children keep food diaries, recording all of the sugary drinks and factory-processed junk foods they eat in a day. They’ll be astonished at how many they consume. Kids may moan, but they’ll get hungry and learn to replace cheese puffs with low-fat cheese.

For great advice on other ways parents can make healthy eating easier, check out the entire article here.

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Parental bullying and overweight kids

by Tripp Underwood on June 2, 2010

Bored Child Overweight kids can fall victim to all kinds of bullying. From name calling to playground confrontations, studies show heftier kids are more likely to be the target of bullying than children with smaller body sizes.

But what’s a kid to do when he or she is feeling bullied at home because of their weight? A recent news story by CNN focused on a young girl whose family called her names like “Twinkie” and “Gordita” and nagged her about food choices, thinking their criticism would inspire her to lose weight. In actuality the abuse caused her to eat even more, turning to food for the comfort and support she wasn’t offered by her family.

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Is the "bully pulpit" enough to protect kids from unhealthy foods?

by Matt Cyr on May 12, 2010

foxchick An interesting article on CBSNews.com outlines a new plan by First Lady Michelle Obama and her Let’s Move campaign to help curtail the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. One key point the article and the administration make is that there won’t be any federal mandates to curb marketing activities; instead, they’ll rely on the “bully pulpit” (read: peer pressure) to get companies to choose to change their efforts.

It seems that asking the industry that has touted Cocoa Krispies as a way to stave off H1N1 and uses the color pink to sell cigarettes to girls to police itself when it comes to the number one public-health issue in the country is a bit like asking the fox to guard the hen house, but what do you think? Is this the way to affect real change? Is “shaming” marketers into changing their behaviors, as Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz suggests in the article, enough?

David Ludwig, MD, PhD, a childhood obesity expert and director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Optimal Weight for Life Clinic, has written extensively on this topic, including two recent commentaries in the Journal of the American Medical Association: whether front-of-package food labels have become so misleading that they might need to be eliminated altogether and whether the food industry can play a constructive role in the obesity epidemic.

In another Thrive blog post from today, Ludwig talks about his latest JAMA commentary, which recommends bringing back home economics classes to help kids – and their parents – learn how to prepare healthy foods.

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Should schools give grades on kids' weights?

by Kristin Cantu on January 21, 2010

fast food cheeseburger & measuring tape This week there has been a lot of coverage on the topic of childhood obesity. It’s not a new subject and one that we’re likely to hear much more on this year.

The Boston Globe reports that for the next 18 months, every public school in Massachusetts will evaluate whether students weigh too much or too little by calculating their body mass index (BMI) scores. Full story »

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This week on Thrive: Dec. 7 – 11

by Childrens Hospital Boston staff on December 13, 2009

Here’s a quick look at what Thrive was up to last week.

Why are suicide clusters more common in teens? Children’s Global Fellow Stephen Sullivan, MD, MPH, addresses the global burden of surgical diseases. KABC in Los Angeles interviewed Children’s Hanno Steen, PhD, about a urine test that quickly identifies cases of appendicitis. Children’s Center for Young Women’s Health youth advisor, Erica, writes a compelling review of the movie, Precious. The HealthMap team gives us our final H1N1 update. David Ludwig, MD, PhD, director of Children’s Optimal Weight for Life Program, just published a commentary in JAMA expressing concern about the widespread use of artificial sweeteners in soft drinks. Our Mediatrician talks about how negative portrayals of black women in movies affects teens. We give a roundup on all of the news this week on the fight for what our children should be eating and drinking.

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