Originally published December 18 2005
Forum highlights the consequences of obesity and its acceptance in society
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Dr. David Haslam, the clinical director of the National Obesity Forum, talks about the changing perception of obesity and how it has become much more acceptable than it used to be, a development that could be considered detrimental to the state of public health.
The plump eight-year-old ballerina is a sign of the times, doctors say, showing that children are not only growing fatter but that they care less about showing it.
Dr David Haslam, the clinical director of the National Obesity Forum, said: "The fact that children seem not to be so bashful about appearing on stage if they are very overweight shows that the benchmarks by which they judge themselves and the benchmarks by which they are judged by other children and by their parents are all changing.
"That in turn gives them less motivation to lose weight and the benchmark will presumably keep rising unless we find some way of persuading them to change.
The number of children who are measured on the body mass index (weight in kilos divided by the square of height in metres) as being overweight or obese is rising fast.
Figures published by the Department of Health last April showed that 27.7 per cent of children were overweight, that is to say their BMI was between 25 and 30.
Dr Haslam, who is also a GP, said: "This is something I am seeing more and more in my own practice and it is pretty alarming the number of kids and the size of kids one sees with problems of this kind."
The growth in alcohol consumption by younger people means that the liver is being attacked from two directions, doctors say.
The particular damage done to it by what doctors call "visceral fat", or what laymen would call the spare tyre, is that the collected fat cells act in the same way as a gland, producing harmful hormones called cytokines.
Because they are close to the liver, it is the first organ they attack.
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