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Fast
Food Is Lure to Overweight Children
Overweight children
appear to be especially susceptible to the lure of fast
food, a study found. They stuff themselves even more ravenously
than other youngsters do and are less able to compensate
by eating sparingly the rest of the day.
The study is nutrition experts' latest attempt to nail down
the link they suspect exists between fast food and the daunting
increase in obesity, which now afflicts millions of teenagers.
Even though the drive-through window is often blamed for
Americans' big and growing weight problem, its exact role
is less clear, since people overindulge in many ways while
getting little exercise. Certainly the meals can be huge
and calorie dense. But many indulge in the occasional triple
cheeseburger with bacon without bulking up.
"Everybody is eating fast food, in all socio-economic
groups," notes Dr. David Ludwig, a child obesity expert.
"But if everybody is eating it, why are some people
still thin?"
His team at Boston's Children's Hospital set out to find
the answer by setting up an experiment at a food court.
The volunteer eaters were 26 obese children and 28 who were
of normal size.
"Eat as much or as little as you like, until you have
had enough," the youngsters were told. "There
is more food available, and you may eat as much as you want."
Everyone started out with the equivalent of a supersize
value meal of chicken nuggets, fries, cola and cookies that
added up to 2,100 calories. And eat they did. Large or lean,
the children wolfed down plenty of food.
"They consume more than half of the calories they need
for the whole day in about 20 minutes," Ludwig said.
But in the end, the big kids ate more. The obese youngsters
downed 67 percent of their daily calories in one sitting,
while the normal-size ones got 57 percent.
Next, the researchers made an unannounced call to see how
much the same youngsters eat over a whole day when on their
own. On a day they had fast food, the obese youngsters ate
a total of 400 more calories than on a day when they ate
at home. However, the lean kids ate the same amount of total
calories whether they had a fast food meal or not.
They concluded that overweight children are more susceptible
to gargantuan fast food meals because they do not have —
or have somehow lost — the ability to even out their
intake by cutting back over the rest of the day.
"Do certain people have trouble compensating for energy-dense
fast food? This study suggests overweight people may,"
said Simone French, a psychologist at the University of
Minnesota.
The research was presented at the annual meeting of the
North American Association for the Study of Obesity, which
concluded Wednesday. Among other reports at the meeting:
_Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have been following
1,337 men since their graduation from medical school between
1948 and 1964. They found that the average weight gain was
one-third of a pound per year up to age 65. After that,
weight plateaus, and losing weight in later years is not
healthy or normal.
_To test the theory that people eat less if they take smaller
bites, researchers from the Pennington Biomedical Research
Center in Baton Rouge, La., fitted overweight volunteers
with a "behavior modification tool" that "fits
into the upper palate of the mouth and reduces the size
of the oral cavity." In the two-day experiment, the
gadget cut their daily intake by 659 calories. A longer
study will be necessary to prove it works over time to reduce
weight.
_Russ Lopez of Boston University looked for a link between
urban sprawl and obesity. He rated sprawl in U.S. metropolitan
areas on a 100-point scale and matched it with the amount
of physical activity people reported in a nationwide survey.
For each one-point increase in sprawl, people's physical
activity declined by one-third of 1 percent.
On the Net:
http://www.naaso.org
Article Source: Associated Press
Article Author: Daniel Q. Haney
Net Reference 102
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