The CDC has taken the first stand against childhood obesity which has risen to almost 20% of children between the ages of 5 and 11. Teens have it nearly as bad. These kids are at very real long term risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers and arthritis. Some already show signs of disease such as poor glucose tolerance, high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. A study presented at the American Heart Association’s 2010 Conference on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism showed that physical fitness was directly correlated with academic achievement.The study followed kids from 5th to 7th grade. The kids who were fit the whole time did the best on standardized testing. Those who started out unfit but became so by the 7th grade followed up second. Fit in 5th but losing fitness by 7th followed and the fully unfit kids finished last in academic performance. “The take-home message from this study is that we want our kids to be fit as long as possible and it will show in their academic performance,” Lesley A. Cottrell, Ph.D., presenting researcher, said. “But if we can intervene on those children who are not necessarily fit and get them to physically fit levels, we may also see their academic performance increase.”

Pushing fitness too far has a downside too. At this week’s 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), two studies are being presented that show that youth athletic injuries are on the rise and having lasting impact on sports participants.

One study found that 25% of youth baseball players are suffering elbow pain and 15% of them have suffered real bone or cartilage injuries. For pitchers it’s much worse with bone and cartilage injuries climbing over 50%. These are largely preventable but can result in serious long term problems if not treated including both sports career ending injuries and lifetime pain.

Lengthening adolescent athletic schedules are creating problems too. “More adolescents are participating in year-round sports without seasonal breaks, or they are playing on multiple teams simultaneously,” says Thomas M. DeBerardino, MD. “This increased exposure means there will continue to be growing numbers of significant musculoskeletal injuries, both traumatic and chronic overuse.”

For teens this can mean problems both now and down the road. Treating them as miniature adults both in their training schedules and in treatment for injury can result in stunted growth, arthritis and a lifetime of pain and loss of function.

Keeping kids healthy is a key to having them age against the machine as they get older but pushing them too hard can have just the opposite effect.

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While on average, 26.5% of Americans are obese, residents of the 10 fattest cities were at minimum 32.9% obese. But where things get interesting is in the habits of those people as compared to national averages. In 6 out of 10 of those cities, people claim they ate healthier than the national average and eat veggies regularly; in 8 out of 10 cities, more people claim they exercise regularly than the national average. There are more smokers than the national average in 6 of the 10 cities. In 6 of the cities there was a higher rate of not having health insurance, and in 9 of those cities there was a higher rate of not having enough money for food. How sad and ironic.

What is really sobering is that in 8 or 9 of those cities there are more bad health issues than the national average: more diabetes, more high blood pressure, more high cholesterol, and more heart attacks. Each. Yest more data against the idea of “fat but healthy.”

Then there are America’s 10 slimmest cities, all of which are coastal or mountain. The average obesity rate of all 10 cities is 18.7%, well below the national average. In those cities, more people report eating right, eating veggies, and not smoking than the national average. In every one of the 10 cities, people report getting regular exercise. Only 1 city had a lower rate of being able to afford food than the national average.

And not surprisingly, every one of the thin cities had lower than average rates of diabetes and heart attacks. Only 9 had lower rates of high blood pressure and high cholesterol; not everybody’s perfect.

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Dr. Kristen G. Hairston of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine just published an article in the journal Sleep showing “a clear association between averaging five hours or less of sleep each night and large increases in visceral fat, or fat around the organs” for people under 40. As we’ve said before, “Visceral fat is a major risk factor for everything from metabolic syndrome to organic brain disease to liver cancer and prostate cancer.”

Nevertheless, lots of extra sleep isn’t good either. The same study found that people who slept more than 8 hours per night also had higher BMI measurements, more subcutaneous fat, and more visceral fat than people who managed to sleep 6-7 hours nightly.

One caution about this study: it only involved Hispanics and African Americans. Why? “Short sleep has become more common in the United States and minorities are disproportionately affected, said Hairston, an affiliate of the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity, part of the School of Medicine. They are also more prone to metabolic conditions, including increased rates of obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.” So it remains to be seen whether the correlation between sleep and fat is also true among other ethnic groups.

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For the record, the absolute worst fries in terms of calories and fat is Chili’s Texas Cheese Fries with Jalapeno Ranch, coming in at 1920 calories and 23 grams of pure fat.

Surprisingly, the best fries in America from a calorie standpoint is found at the Golden Arches — a McDonald’s small order of fries is a mere 230 calories. Of course that’s only 20 calories less than their regular hamburger. So it does turn out that — if you can limit yourself to a “Happy Meal” — you can actually eat at McDonald’s for under 500 calories. And you even get a toy surprise!

That brings us to yesterday’s news from New Zealand, where McDonald’s is teaming up with none other than Weight Watchers. Specifically, “Three meals: Chicken McNuggets, Filet-O-Fish and a chicken wrap will be labeled with the Weight Watchers logo.” Each of these combo meals will be 6.5 Weight Watchers points. The arrangement is already coming in for criticism as “a marketing ploy that doesn’t promote healthy eating.” It is worth pointing out that all 3 entrees have more calories than the regular hamburger, and that many of McDonald’s salads have more calories than their small order of fries, particularly if you add salad dressing.

So the take away lesson is that you can eat a healthy diet and still have the occasional fast food meal, but only if you pay attention to actual nutrition information instead of marketing hype.

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For those who suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), a condition that makes a mockery of regularity, things are always a little more vexing. For them, yogurt induced regularity would be a godsend. Publishing in Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics, researchers have taken a good look at this very question.Researchers in Stockholm recruited 74 patients with IBS and put them on an 8 week regimen of daily yogurt with various probiotic bacteria or placebo milk without probiotics. What they found was that in the first 2 weeks, the IBS patients getting the probiotics did generally better. It didn’t last; by 8 weeks there was no difference between the two groups. The researchers crunched numbers and found a small but insignificant difference that might suggest that the yogurt patients did better, but they also calculated that a sample of at least 600 patients would have been needed to determine whether that was significant.

Probiotic yogurt has evidence support for many things, from regularity to cancer protection. WebMD does a great summary of the benefits of yogurt which is worth reading.

Unfortunately for IBS patients it looks like yogurt isn’t a panacea. For the rest of us, it’s a good dietary idea.

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