Rapid Responses to:
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Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
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Running for my life from bicycle laws
- Mark S Kern (9 December 2000)
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Obesity, Bottle Feeding and Brain Serotonin Deficits
- James W Prescott (9 December 2000)
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Childhood obesity needs an environmental cure. It's child's play!
- Colin Guthrie (10 December 2000)
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Mark S Kern, zip nada
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If you really want to discourage, slow down, perhaps even stop childhood obesity. Outlaw all bicycle laws, unless a person is interfering with the right of way of others. |
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James W Prescott, Independent Scholar Home
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The following letter on chilhood obesity was sent to the New York Times and was unpublished. No one seems to want to make a conncection with insufficient breastfeeding and deficits of tryptophan associated with bottle feeding where tryptophan is necessary for the development of brain serotonin. Brain serotonin deficits are linked to a variety of emotional- behavioral disorders including eating disorders. How many obese children have been breastfeed for "two years of age and beyond", as recommended by WHO and UNICEF? See:
http://www.violence.de/prescott/pppj/article.html
BIOBEHAVIORAL SYSTEMS 9 Midline Drive #2-23
26 October 2000
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
Dear Sir,
Eating disorders--anorexia, bulimia and obesity--have become the
current popular indicators of our national psychopathology that are linked
to depression, loneliness, hate/love, anxiety, phobias, obsessive-
compulsive disorders, etc. (Goode: Watching Volunteers Eat, Psychiatrists
Seek Clues to Obesity-NYT, 10/24/00).
Surprisingly, no mention was made that eating disorders are strongly
linked to brain serotonin disorders, a linkage that has been well
documented by Professor Judith Wurtman at the MIT's Clinical Research
Center (Wurtman and Suffes: The Serotonin Solution, 1996). Deficits of
brain serotonin are well known to mediate depression, impulse dyscontrol
and violence.
Less well known are the linkages of brain serotonin deficits to the
lack of breastfeeding, where the amino acid tryptophan is richly present
in colostrum and breastmilk but absent in formula milk. Tryptophan is an
essential dietary nutrient, which is converted into brain serotonin. Only
14% of American mothers are breastfeeding at one year, when WHO and UNICEF
recommend breastfeeding for "two years of age and beyond".
Normal brain development is being compromised in generations of
Americans through insufficient breastfeeding, which can be considered a
significant contributing factor to the health epidemics of depression,
impulse dyscontrol, violence and eating disorders that are becoming more
and more a part of American life (see: www.violence.de).
Sincerely,
James W. Prescott, Ph.D.
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Colin Guthrie, GP and Director of Transform Scotland ( A sustainable transport organisation) 1448 Dumbarton Road Glasgow G14 9DW
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Obesity and one of it's most evil sequelae , type 2 Diabetes, are not really ' medical conditions '- in the sense that we doctors can do anything about them. I tried very hard for several years in our small medical practice in Glasgow to change behaviour patterns with groups of patients meeting as weekly clubs and meshing them with an exercise referral scheme as well as specialist practice-based dietetic advice. At one time half my patients would appear with their weighing -in sheet and I would weigh them and then congratulate or commiserate before handing out more leaflets and wise advice. My main target were my Type 2 diabetics and at one time I felt very proud of having 'cured 'three of them by a combination of weight loss and increased exercise. I became one of those exceptionally boring advocates of health promotion but I was really quite blinkered. My star patients eventually succumbed to the old abdominal roly poly and were soon sucked back into the awful whirlpool of insulin insensitivity and it's associated horrors. A few patients have remained thinner and more active but I now realise that it is extremely difficult to change someone's behaviour permanently. In fact, I think it borders on arrogance for us doctors to think we can change the lives of others by changing their behaviour. I now realise that it wasn't my patients who didn't understand, it was me who didn't understand. Obesity and diabetes are essentially 'normal' adaptive response to our abnormal environment. It's a bit like that American Psychiatrist who said a few years ago that the odd people nowadays aren't the ones that are depressed but the ones that are happy. It's now fast reaching the stage where to have a BMI of less than 25 will be abnormal. I now understand that obesity is an environmental problem. It is a problem of immense proportions that affects all of us but is particularly important for our children. This editorial concentrated on sporting activities as organised by agencies such as schools. But the real engine of childhood activity isn't formal sports at all but the chaotic frenzy of that much maligned and misunderstood jewel of childhood, child's play. Child's play is the activity that stretches their physical as well as their emotional development. It needs to have a bit of danger and it needs to be unstructured and it must be free from the interference of adults. I am very grateful to Dr Meyer Hillman of the Policy Institute in London for the wonderful insight into the health implications of Child's Play that he recently gave at a Play Scotland conference in Glasgow. He stressed how we adults have made our society adult-centric and that the most adverse adult-centric change affecting our children has been adult car-centric behaviour. This has created a very hostile environment where parents are loathe to allow their children to play outside due to the very real danger from an excessive number of vehicles travelling at dangerous speeds. We now have a society that believes that roads exist only for the conveyance of cars and that children should 'know' not to play in the street.The street has been deprived of all social functions and is now a linear car park with a race track down the middle. He also highlighted the abnormal fear of strangers fanned by newspapers interested only in profit. The evidence shows that murders of children by strangers has remained about the same since the fifties. In fact, the real danger for children from all types of assault are their parents and other relatives. Parents now have this erroneous perceived fear which makes them restrict their child's adventures for fear of assault by a stranger. Now we have children driven to school by parents because the roads are so busy ( busy due to parents driving children to school of course ) and children now not being permitted to play boisterously in school for fear of litigation against the school. ( This is research recently published in TMS of 1000 children from several English schools showing that these schools do not allow games involving balls or anything approaching robust play for fear of litigation in case of child accidents.) Play for some children now means being driven across town and dumped in one of those horrible play centres where they bounce inanely between bits of coloured plastic before gorging themselves in the hamburger bar or sweet shop. No chance of taking a risk and developing their boundaries or getting proper exercise.. America is much worse than Britain with their totally insane car culture and cities where to be on the sidewalk is synonymous with being a vagrant or drug dealer. It's all those bits of walking and play that gets our metabolic freewheels spinning . If we can't come up with a society where that is an attractive and available option then the accelerating epidemic on both sides of the atlantic then the effects will be terrible. We need our governments to truly act in the interests of the people and cease being just at the beck and call of big business.We need much lower speed limits so our kids can venture out onto their streets. We need the provision of many more Home Zones like they have had for many years in countries like Holland. In a Home Zone the kid calls the shots. The cars are restricted to 10 mph by reducing line of sight with obstacles such as trees and swings. The street goes back to a real social function. We need some common sense knocked into the media to prevent them frightening parents unnecessarily simply to make profits. We need to remember how important play was in our development and give our kids the same chance to go wild and to let off steam in a safe environment. Colin Guthrie |
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