HOUSTON – Dr. Maneesh Kumar from Kumar Pediatrics in southwest Houston sees patients in a medically underserved part of the city. He said child obesity rates are even higher than the national average in his practice.
Dr. Kumar said 30% of his patients, going down to as young as 3 years old, are overweight and some are facing grown-up problems.
“One of the ones we deal with on a day-to-day basis is snoring. When you’re heavier than you should be, you’re more likely to snore and when you snore, it increases the strain on your heart,” Kumar explained. “In the short term, these kids have more mood, attention, focus and behavior issues. But in the long run, they have a much higher lifetime risk of high blood pressure and heart attacks and strokes... It’s one thing for an adult to snore, but when a child snores, they have an entire lifetime ahead of them to suffer the consequences of these things.”
Reversing the issue requires consulting with the entire family. He said the patients who are successful at losing weight are those whose entire family makes changes.
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“It is very rarely as easy as ‘I eat at McDonald’s every day.’ Most of the time, it is social circumstances,” Kumar said. “There could be psychological factors, cultural factors, access to food, work-related issues for family members.”
Most adults in children’s lives are working. Among Kumar’s patient population, he said parents are sometimes working two jobs, not preparing meals.
Bad health habits can begin at a younger age than you might guess.
“I would say as soon as children that might be formula or breast milk fed are weaned from either or both of those, we start to see very poor lifestyle and dietary habits,” Kumar said. “There are parts of the developing world, third-world countries where soda was, like Coca-Cola in particular, was safer to drink than water... Well, that initiates the cascade of unhealthy weight gain and then drives your physiologic need for more calories and drives your obesity.”
To reverse the issue and eliminate comorbidities, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently updated its guidelines to recommend surgery and medications for some teens with severe obesity.
“We don’t conventionally turn to diet pills in children for the purpose of weight management. We use so-called diet pills for the purpose of addressing underlying metabolic problems and addressing the underlying metabolic problems as a component of our weight management plan,” Kumar explained.
In extreme cases, as a last resort, Dr. Kumar said he would recommend weight loss surgery.
The number of youths 10 to 19 having metabolic and bariatric surgeries has been rising since 2016 and jumped 19% between 2020 and 2021.
The Eating Recovery Center of Houston, which counsels patients with eating disorders, said children should be left out of the conversation. Ask to speak with your pediatrician in private when discussing obesity so as not to psychologically damage the child.
However, Dr. Kumar said kids need to be in the room and part of the conversation concerning their health journey.
“There are a host of psychosocial factors that remain unaddressed because of the way we live. If you had cancer, we would talk about it. We would do everything we could to fix it. Well, just like cancer, we will do everything we can to fix this, but it takes all of us to do this,” Kumar said.
Watch the video below to see how kids are gaining more weight during the summer months.
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