Miracle Drug
If there are more fat kids, and fat adults allegedly run a higher risk of high cholesterol (due to Teh Fatz), is it a good idea to medicate those kids to prevent them from getting high cholesterol?
The American Academy of Pediatrics seems to think so, as they're going to recommend more screenings and drugs to kids as young as 8. Tara Parker-Pope writes for the New York Times:
Previously, the academy had said cholesterol drugs should be considered in children older than 10 if they fail to lose weight after a 6- to 12-month effort. The academy estimated that under the current guidelines, 30 percent to 60 percent of children with high cholesterol were being missed. And for some children, cholesterol-lowering drugs, called statins, may be their best hope of lowering their risk of early heart attack, proponents said.
So essentially, if kids are put on a diet and maybe, you know, develop an eating disorder but don't lower their cholesterol then it's all right to put 'em on drugs. I guess that's all well and good, right? I mean, the only thing that would derail this weapon in the Globesity Crisis™ would be... science. Emphasis mine.
Surprisingly, the paper published in the medical journal Pediatrics that explains the new guidelines notes that among adolescents, average total cholesterol levels as well as LDL and HDL cholesterol have remained stable.
Oops. Then there's this:
The guidelines give no guidance on how long a child should stay on drug treatment.
Of course not! Why?
Because statins have been around since only the mid-1980s, there is no evidence to show whether giving statins to a child will lower the risk for heart attack in middle age.
So in summary, we're going to increase screening of cholesterol on kids whose families do and do not have cholesterol, and probably get them on statins. But who the hell knows if that'll work because there's just not enough data yet.
I don't know - this seems like a bad idea to me. (Inevitably the argument for this would be something like, "Oh! But being fat is much worse! Here's why!" etc. etc. etc.)
The article leaves us with this parting shot:
The academy also now recommends giving children low-fat milk after 12 months if a doctor is concerned about future weight problems. Although children need fat for brain development, the group says that because children often consume so much fat, low-fat milk is now appropriate.
Coming soon: the death of full-fat milk. Ugh. What a crock. (Thanks, Kelly.)
However, evidence from adults shows they block the body's production of CoEnzymeQ10, and thus *hugely* raise the incidence of death from heart failure. No one, of any age, should be taking statins, but they turn a huge profit for drug companies, and thus continue to be sold in vast quantities. But, having your heart fail in your teens would be worth good cholesterol numbers, right?
It's rather shameful that a 'medical' organization is encouraging giving milk to children at all, really. Milk can trigger the development of type 1 diabetes in children predisposed to the illness and can certainly contribute to allergies and other immune-system problems. However, the amount of fat in milk could hardly be expected to make a difference in this -- it is the milk proteins, not the milk fat, which appears to be to blame. Children do need lots of plant-sourced fats, however.
And don't forget that statins reduce both good AND bad cholesterol - and may contribute to early onset dementia in some patients. NOT a good thing to be giving to developing brains and bodies.
vidyapriya: Doctors here in Australia often recommend that patients on statins take a CoEnzyme Q10 supplement with their statins, but most patients don't do this, because it's not a subsidised medication like the statins.
Thin people can have high cholesterol too. Yet nobody is suggesting that skinny kids get screened.
And why are they prescribing drugs to anyone that can LOWER HDL???
I don't know what's scarier: the overmedication going on in the free market health care system in the US, or the way care is being rationed based on arbitrary measures in some government funded systems. One thing is for sure: fat people are being used as scapegoats everywhere.
Gee, the WHO recommends breastfeeding for AT LEAST two years - and last I checked, breast milk is high in fat. Funny how nature knows better than obesity epi-panic advocates - except totally not. Not funny, not odd, not anything but disgusting.
Zero isn't a size, it's a warning sign. - Carson Kressley
The Kevin Pease Beer Fund Foundation - Won't Someone PLEASE think of the psychology students?
Pill 'em up! Let God sort it out.
*sarcasm*
I thought doctors had pretty much unanimously denounced the whole "fat is bad" theory. *sigh* I read an article yesterday talking about fat babies. Even babies are being scrutinized for obesity. BABIES!!! It's not like they're miniature adults!! They're supposed to have fat on 'em!! Besides, fat babies are freakin' adorable.
Not last time I looked pinkpoodle. There are open-minded doctors out there, but they're very few and getting farther between. A recent study suggested that the vast majority of doctors are deeply fat-phobic, and certainly the stories on the excellent 'First Do No Harm' seem to back this up.
As for the statins (and weight-loss pills, and gastric surgery), you'd think they'd have learned that experimenting on people (especially kids) with treatments that haven't been proven long-term, and crossing their fingers that the side-effects aren't worse than the original condition, might not be such a good thing. But then, we're talking about FAT people here, which changes everything.
And yes, when I see a fat baby or child I don't see a premature death waiting for a place to happen but the cherubic appeal that was more widely appreciated in days gone by. How these supposedly highly-trained professionals can look at such a three year-old and pronounce them 'at risk' with no medical data whatsoever other than the number on a scale absolutely bewilders me.
"if you think fat people have no self-discipline, consider the fact that they haven’t killed you yet." - Miss Conduct, Boston Globe
The guidelines give no guidance on how long a child should stay on drug treatment.
That's because I'm sure the lobbyists for Big Pharma will argue that they should stay on these drugs for the rest of their lives. For their own good! And totes not to pump decades of revenue into the drug companies' pockets.
And you can have my full-fat milk when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
My 10-yr-old has been consistently 'above the curve' since about age 6 months. Her doctor told her I really should try to do something now. As if healthy eating and exercise are new to me or her?! My daughter reassured the doctor that she ate fruits and vegetables and loved to swim and ride her bike all the time. What's your favorite fruit? he demanded. You should have seen the accusing look I got when she answered 'chocolate covered strawberries.' She'd only ever had them once but after all, he did say her favorite!
Needless to say we switched doctors and I met with several before I found one that would not tell her how "off the chart" she was everytime we saw him. He is confident our efforts are for her best health and any "concerns" he has, he shares with me NOT in front of her. There is NO PILL that fixes a problem without creating another problem (sometimes small, sometimes big). Why are parents so quick to try to "fix" their kids? I say to all of them: Get over yourself! You are your child's advocate and defender - a doctor is not a miracle healer, just someone who's read more books on the subject than you...so go read more books!
Defender Mom
Pinkpoodle...Your post made me laugh. My brother was the fattest, jolliest, roly-polyiest baby ever. To this day he's as skinny as a rail. I, on the other hand, was the smallest baby in our family. Go figure!
Basic physiology would indicate that:
1) since every friggin cell in your body is made of cholesterol, and
2) since children's bodies are heavily invested in growing lots of new cells, then
3) putting kids on cholesterol-lowering medications might not work out so good.
And why are they prescribing drugs to anyone that can LOWER HDL???
Agreed, that is ridiculous. My mom has high cholesterol. She also has an unusually high HDL, over 100. (I don't think it's a "lifestyle" thing either, because her mother's eating and drinking habits could not have been more different and she had the same thing. And neither of them was ever fat for two seconds.) She would tell any doctor who tried to put her on a statin to go get stuffed, and well she should.
Familial hypercholesterolemia, which is really the only kind you could possibly justify ever putting a young person on a statin for, is inherited directly from one or both parents. It's not something that can be "avoided" with exercise and diet (although they can certainly be useful treatment tools if you know the condition is there), and it's also quite rare, only a fraction of one percent of the population has it. So unless the kid was adopted and nothing is known about his/her family medical history, it's something a doctor would know about pretty much from the getgo; no "screening" needs to be done other than simply asking the parents if they have it themselves. But they make it sound like virtually every fat kid needs to be on this kind of drug, and that's preposterous.
Good Point DefenderMom.
Yah know, I can remember the first time I saw one of those, paragraph long disclaimer tagged, ads after the FDA deregulated drug advertising in the '90's. I vaguely remember it as some oral medication that promoted hair growth in male pattern baldness but what struck me, practically into a state of unconsciousness, was the protracted warning that came toward the end of the commercial. Tracked in with a calm and reasonable sounding voice, it went something like; 'Women, pregnant mothers, or women who are about to BECOME pregnant, should avoid touching or coming in contact with broken capsules!' (Can you say; Birth Defects? Yeah, I know you could) My first thought was 'And they want *I*, should take this stuff internally?!' Well, apparently, some folks must have been ok with it because it's gotten to the point where pharmaceutical co.'s feels they can push 'better living through chemistry' on kids via their parents. SO much better! 'Cause, as louveciennes points out, the younger they can get 'um, the longer they can SELL 'um. Don't worry your woozy little heads about side effects. By the time they roll around we'll have something on the market for that too. . . Er, I mean, WHAT side effects?
Welcome to the War. That would be the the Drug War. No, not THAT metaphorical war. It's practically outlived it's shelf life anyway, I'm talking about the War Big Pharma is waging ON america and the world through all that convenient propaganda overflowing out of the THIRD WW. You know, the War against the Wide, a/k/a the War on Obesity and it's obvious moral decay.
Got ya covered secondhelpinglaura. Praise the Lord and pass the pills!
Everything great and worthwhile in human life is an accumulation of hundreds
and sometimes thousands of tiny efforts and sacrifices that nobody ever
sees or appreciates. - Law of Accumulation
Let's add the fact that many cholesterol-lowering drugs adversely affect fertility. So who knows what long-term use will cause?