Get kids to a good pre-teen weight and cut diabetes risk
‘‘If you can slow the rise of obesity in very young children, you have a chance of really preventing future cases of diabetes.’’ Steven Gortmaker, Harvard School of Public Health
There may be a critical window for overweight kids to get to a healthy level. Those who shed their extra kilograms by age 13 have the same risk of developing diabetes in adulthood as others who have never weighed too much, a large study of Danish men has found.
Diabetes can develop when the body can’t properly use insulin to turn food into energy. Being overweight at any age raises the chances of the most common form, Type 2. But it’s not known whether or how much that risk is reduced if people lose weight, and when.
‘‘This study seems to suggest that overweight in adolescence is particularly harmful’’ and that reversing it by then could do a lot of good, said Dr Stephen Daniels, paediatrics chief at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
The study involved 62,565 men
UNITED STATES:
in Denmark, where mandatory school and military service exams tracked their health for decades. Their heights and weights were measured when they were 7, 13, and between 17 and 26. National health records were used to see how many developed diabetes.
Men who were overweight at age 7 but weren’t by 13 had similar odds of diabetes later in life as men who had never been overweight.
Those who were overweight only at 13, or only at 7 and 13, had a lower risk than those who stayed overweight throughout young adulthood, but a higher risk than men who had never been overweight.
These were ‘‘hopeful results’’ that showed there were benefits if parents could help chubby kids ‘‘grow into a healthy weight’’, said Steven Gortmaker, a childhood obesity researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. ‘‘If you can slow the rise of obesity in very young children, you have a chance of really preventing future cases of diabetes.’’
Why might the teen years matter so much?
‘‘At adolescence, you become more insulin-resistant, just sort of a natural part of puberty,’’ Daniels explained. The muscles and organs don’t use insulin as well after then, so it takes more to get the same job done.
The study had many limitations – it only involved men, and there was no information on what they weighed in adulthood, when the diabetes developed.
It was also a different time and place – decades ago in Denmark, only 5 to 8 per cent of these men had been overweight as children or teens. Today, more than 23 per cent of kids worldwide are overweight. –AP