According to Feeding America statistics, 24.1 percent of North Carolina children under age 5 aren’t getting the essential nutrients they need. Doctors worry that situation that can cost children their health, especially because they’re losing nutrients in a major early growth period in their lives. Let’s be clear. We hear many things about obesity and disease, but we rarely hear of it spoken of in terms of malnutrition. Obesity is malnutrition. Obesity is internal starvation. The obese do not get the benefit of the calories they consume. Those calories get stored in fat tissue and because insulin levels are so high, the body is prohibited from using these fatty acids to fuel the body. Only a diet that lowers insulin levels can free those fatty acids so that they might be used for energy and the person will lose weight. For more on this subject, visit our ZC community forum where hundreds of people are overcoming obesity and retaining their health by eating such a diet.As I wrote in my previous post, it’s been well known and even publicly revealed since 1973, where Van Itallie admitted that a diet high in carbohydrates would result in vitamin deficiencies yet the McGovern select committee still advised the American public to eat a high carbohydrate diet. They basically put us all on a large public experiment which has been an abysmal failure. Despite this failure, the experts continue to insist that we would ameliorate this problem if we only ate more fruits and vegetables.
Dr. Jugta Kahai, a pediatrician at Oak Island Pediatrics is seeing a lot more children coming into her office with chronic constipation, abdominal problems, iron deficiency, type II diabetes and hypertension, problems often caused or aggravated by poor diets. Without diets rich in fruits and vegetables, the doctor said, children are missing essential vitamins and fiber that help their bodies function. There is nothing in fiber that is remotely beneficial to the human body.
By the early 1970s, the belief that dietary fat was the primary cause of heart disease was widespread and any theory explaining cause had to be consistent with this view or else it was flatly rejected. The notion that refined and easily digestible carbohydrates caused chronic disease was so rejected.
Peter Cleave had a very superior hypothesis known as the Saccharine Disease hypothesis which explained heart disease in terms of the disparity in disease rates among populations, atherosclerosis, hypertension, obesity, diabetes and the apparent absence of chronic disease in isolated populations. Despite the ability of this hypothesis to explain all the observations, it still needed to be reconciled with Ancel Keys dietary fat hypothesis of heart disease.
Conciliation arrived in the form of fiber, the indigestible carbohydrates in vegetables, starches, and grains. This replaced refined carbohydrates and sugar as the cause of chronic diseases. The fiber hypothesis was brought upon us by the efforts of one Dennis Burkitt, of Burkitt’s lymphoma fame, who was a former missionary surgeon. He proposed that “indigestible roughage” was protective against chronic disease. This notion was consistent with Keys hypothesis and it resonated with the era’s countercultural leanings toward diets heavy in vegetables, legumes and cereal grains, just as it does today.
This fiber hypothesis was based entirely on Cleave’s hypothesis but simply inverted the causal agent. Burkitt argued that the subtraction of fiber from the diet led to constipation and ultimately to chronic disease, whereas Cleave argued that the addition of sugar was the culprit. The fiber deficiency was caused by the removing of the fiber during the refining process or by consuming carbohydrates when we should have been eating bulky, fibrous, roughage.
This fiber hypothesis caught on immediately upon entering the medical journals even though it could not explain the observations. In 1966, Burkitt met Cleave after being told by Richard Doll about his saccharine-disease hypothesis, and having revelations after reading Cleave’s book, Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis and the Saccharine Disease. Burkitt was quoted as saying:
“What he was saying was that many of the common diseases in post-industrialized western countries are rare throughout the third world, were rare even in England or New York until about the First World War, are equally common in black and white Americans, and therefore must be due not to our skin color or our genes, but to the way we live. Now, this made an enormous amount of sense to me because I knew from my experience in Africa that he was perfectly right saying this.”
Burkitt was far more influential than Peter Cleave and because he was a former missionary surgeon, he had access to a wide network of 150 African hospitals in rural areas that could answer queries such as whether they saw gallstones, appendicitis, diverticular disease, coronary heart disease, etc. The results confirmed Cleave’s hypothesis. Because Burkitt had the reputation that Cleave and diabetologists George Campbell did not; he was able to successfully get doctors to pay attention to his results. Cleave and Campbell were dismissed as “cranks.”
If you want to know why our children are suffering it is because of situations like this. When the medical community is faced with observations that don’t follow their belief system, they have a very difficult time changing their beliefs to match the evidence. They continually go on and on about “fatty foods” and bad diets, yet the only thing they have to rely on is fruits and vegetables which only make us more deficient in the very vitamins that we need.
Children’s HealthWatch, a Boston-based nonpartisan pediatric research network, says that chronic malnutrition in children can slow brain development in the crucial growth stages before age 3, can affect school readiness in the preschool years and academic performance through high school. The research also points to correlations between food insecurity and mental health and obesity in school-aged children.
Ironically, Dr. Lenard Edralin, a pediatrician at Knox Clinic Pediatrics in Wilmington, is seeing more obese children situations because they eat the wrong foods to fill up. “The perception of malnourishment that you see on TV is of the skinny little kid with the distended belly,” he said. “We’re seeing the obese kids because all the healthy foods cost more than the junk foods. . . You might be getting enough fats, but that doesn’t translate to the brain can use that.”
Sorry to disagree with you, Dr. Edralin, but these children are NOT getting enough fat. The truth is when insulin levels are raised (as they are when people eat refined carbohydrates) the fatty acids are placed into storage and are rendered unavailable to the body. Thus the malnutrition that results. The body is completely unaware of these fatty acids and it continues to eat and consume more and more food because it thinks its starving. High insulin levels cause the metabolic disorder and the symptoms are the chronic diseases of civilization. They used to only affect the elderly but since our sugar consumption has risen, the doctors are seeing these symptoms in children at a striking early age.
An increase in childhood obesity is one thing local doctors don’t want to see. The recent Trust for America’s Health report “F As in Fat 2009” states that 33.5 percent of North Carolina children are either overweight or obese. Right now, Kelly and two of her children live in a converted motel in Oak Island. Kelly drives a cab for $200 per week with tips and pays $150 of those wages back in rent each week, leaving just $50 to feed herself, Tommy and her 17-year-old daughter. The children’s father doesn’t live with the family. They get their food from food pantries, eating with relatives, local produce stands and occasionally the grocery store.
Lack of nutritional education is another cause of the problem, said Dr. Gloria Vreeland with North Brunswick Family Medicine in Leland. She’s seeing a lot of rotting teeth in children as young as 2, because “the parents are coming into the office with bottles full of sweet tea, Mountain Dew, Pepsi or juice because that’s what they (the parents) drink,” she said.
The “Southern diet” of fried foods, a meat-and-potatoes mentality and vegetables that mainly come in casserole form are another part of the problem, Vreeland added. Do you notice that they just cited the fact that people enter the doctor’s offices with sweet tea and sugary drinks yet they continue to blame fatty foods.
Americans have eaten meat and potatoes and Southern foods since the 1800s yet they were never this fat nor this malnourished. However, their sugar consumption has risen exponentially. Surely our physicians can’t be this ignorant. The solution for many families, say doctors, is beginning to think consciously about their budget and cut out anything unnecessary. It would help, dear Doctors, if you knew what to tell them to cut out.
A change in the state’s WIC rules this fall could help families eat better. Starting Oct. 1, WIC vouchers can be used to buy fruits and vegetables, whole grain cereals, brown rice, tofu and eggs along with juice, milk and cheese to meet new federal dietary standards to reduce fat and sugar consumption. This problem of nutritional misinformation doesn’t just stop with patients and the public. It is also shared by the doctors as well. Many of them are obese and have no way of knowing how to handle their own issues, much less those of their patients. Yet they continue to pass out this bad advice. It’s very true that people should reduce sugar consumption but if you are asking people to trade tasty sugary treats with tasteless vegetables and fruits which pale in sweetness as compared to the refined carbs, then you’re asking far too much. Fruits and vegetables also have an effect on blood sugar and they only exacerbate cravings. This only drives the children to eat more and more sweets. You have to provide an alternative that people can afford and one which does not cause them to crave even more sugar.
Meat can do that. Meat can be inexpensive as well. The fattiest cuts are inexpensive because everyone wants to eat lean meat. The food in food pantries are predominantly carbohydrates and canned vegetables. Just as the doctors imagined the ability of limes to cure scurvy, so too they imagine fresh vegetables to work better than the canned variety. Meanwhile, fresh meat always cured scurvy and it also cures malnutrition. However, this goes
against their belief system despite there being zero evidence to support such a system.
