Adolescent Obesity

If you watched the news at the end of 2006, I’m sure you saw the report about the impact of the Thanksgiving holiday on college-student weights.

The study was presented at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society in Boston. Here’s a summary:

94 college students were weighed the week before Thanksgiving and, again, within a week of their return to campus — and the average weight of the students increased by 1.1 pounds.

Wow! That’s pretty darn interesting. A whole pound!!

I don’t know about you but my weight varies by several pounds — up and down — over a two week period. I’m sure this is due to how much food I have in my stomach, how much water my body is retaining, how precise my scale is, what clothes I’m wearing, how full my bladder is, and other factors I probably don’t understand.

I also know that I might gain real weight for a few days and then my body responds and I naturally eat less and lose the weight.

So, it doesn’t surprise me at all that 94 student’s weight might vary by a pound between two weighings over a 12 days period.

But, it sure seemed to surprise the researchers and the national media — and led to all sorts of silly explanations as to what was going on.

The most prominent explanation for this one pound of weight gain is that students have such lousy food at school that, when they get an opportunity to eat home cooking again, they can’t help themselves. Then, to make matters worse, doting relatives put pressure on the kids to eat.

But, guess what? The researchers did a third weighing of 84 of the 94 kids in mid-January (just a couple of weeks after the Christmas holiday) and most of the average extra “Thanksgiving pound” had disappeared.

Oh, did you miss that fact in the report you saw or heard? Somehow the media left out that little nugget of information from most of their reporting.

Instead, they interviewed obesity experts to get advice as to what to do about this MAJOR problem. Here are the three suggestions I read:

* Don’t encourage students to “gobble” so much when they are home for the holidays
* Don’t fill up with snack mix or appetizers prior to the Thanksgiving meal
* “Bank” calories by being especially virtuous the week or so before the holiday

This kind of media coverage makes me so angry. No wonder the incidence of obesity is going up!!

Allen Oelschlaeger
Author of The Straight Scoop About Childhood Obesity

Have you ever heard of the “Freshman 15″?

It’s widely stated that a lot of college freshman gain 15 pounds during their first year.

Well, it turns out that’s not true. Researchers have now discovered that the weight gain is more like 5 to 7 pounds.

But, here’s the problem — that’s followed by a gain of another 2 to 3 pounds in the sophomore year.

The researchers didn’t know why — but they’re trying to figure it out. Here are what they think are some of the possibilities:

* More drinking of alcohol
* More socializing that involves eating
* More high-fat foods in dorm cafeterias
* Less physical activity

I don’t agree. I think it’s because many of the kids were not taught how to eat before they headed off to college.

How to eat certainly isn’t something you learn by watching food advertising or reading about weight-loss diets. And, according to my kids, it isn’t something that’s being taught in health class.

So, where do kids learn how to eat?

Allen Oelschlaeger
Author of The Straight Scoop About Childhood Obesity