Childhood Excessive Weight Recommendations

When I was training at John Peters Smith Hospital in family practice, I researched a case series on childhood obesity and lower extremity injuries.  At the time, I was really involved in sports medicine, and hypothesized that excessively overweight children injure themselves more. 

While more overweight children had lower extremity injuries, the outcome was not statistically significant.  This surprised me and the reason was probably because larger children are not as active.

In older days, all children did was play outside and exert themselves.  No TV existed, so children were easily distracted by their imaginative play.

Nowadays, we have every excuse in the book to keep our kids indoors.  We’ve got movies, games, air conditioning, and the works.  This plethora of pleasures has decomposed some of our childrens’ health.  It is very important to maintain about 60 minutes of active play time outside, and limit T.V. to 2 hours in a day. 

Another reason well child checks are necessary is that we can evaluate the growth charts and see what the Body Mass Index is based on height and weight. 

Limiting children’s daily intake of sugary sodas or drinks to once a day will help children with healthy caloric intake. 

Our Nutrition specialist, Christine Morgan has a special transitional diet plan from the S.A.D (standard American diet) that will improve children’s, and adults’ health. Food Choices for Transitional Diet:  She says to eliminate all forms of HFCS sugars, (high fructose corn syrup.) 

These sugars are in all soda drinks, and fruit juice drinks, and flavored water drinks.  She also recommends removal of high processed foods such as anything from a package or box, Mac and cheese, hamburger helper, pizzas, and frozen chicken nuggets. 

She recommends replacing all that badness with turbinado sugar, 100% Stevia leaf, 100% fruit spreads, and homemade lemonade or Stevia sweetened herbal green and regular tea. 

Lower processed foods include: old fashioned oatmeal, grapenuts, shredded wheat, high fiber pancakes and waffles, Ezekiel bread, and my favorite low sugar peanut butter!

Christine has a list of great recommended natural foods to try.  I recommend you discussing any personalized diet plans with her.  Her email is:  txnaturaldoc@yahoo.com

I am also posting her transitional diet on my blog.

If you have any questions, email me at runsinthewynd@gmail.com, my twitter is @askjustusmd, and my blog is www.askjustusmd.blogspot.com