The Washington Post
By Brigid Schulte
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Getting Kids to Think About Changing Exercise, Eating Habits Is One Thing; Keeping Them on Track Is Another
Marisol Quiroz watched in alarm as her overweight son ballooned 50 pounds in a year. She had taken him to doctors and nutritionists who told her to make him stop eating so much but never told her how.
David Quiroz, 12, weighed 215 pounds last fall. Half his body mass was fat. His cholesterol was elevated, his blood pressure was too high and the sugar in his blood was hitting dangerous levels. He was well on his way to diabetes and heart disease before reaching high school. His mother made an appointment to see David's pediatrician alone. In tears, she told him she had no idea what to do.
She found out that the medical community does not really know, either. Doctors are great once a child becomes so obese that he or she develops diabetes or heart disease, critics said. But they have yet to figure out how to keep children from becoming obese or how to help them lose weight.
"We pediatricians do a fantastic job talking about food during a child's first year of life. We know precisely how much formula a 6-month-old needs because we've been concerned about failure to thrive. But we're not terribly good about what happens after that," said Nazrat M. Mirza, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children's National Medical Center in the District. "We pediatricians don't even talk about obesity."