An Ohio court has apparently released a 9-year-old boy from the supervision of Cuyahoga County Children & Family Services after he lost more than 50 pounds while in foster care and while living with an uncle in Columbus. Additional information about the case appears in Issue 421 of this Update. The boy, who came to the attention of authorities in March 2010 when he was taken to a hospital with breathing problems, was released to his mother’s custody under protective supervision in March 2012. He has gained a few pounds, but because he continues to work out regularly at a YMCA and has been monitored by a Big Brother, and because his mother will evidently be able to access agency assistance for 90 days, the court determined that the child’s interest had been sufficiently protected. During the most recent court proceedings, the prosecuting attorney reportedly recommended that the child’s mother…
Tag Archives obesity
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has published a May 8, 2012, consensus report assessing more than 800 obesity prevention strategies and identifying those “with the greatest potential to accelerate success.” Released at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Weight of the Nation™ conference and funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the report evidently focuses on five goals for preventing obesity: (i) “integrating physical activity into people’s daily lives”; (ii) “making healthy food and beverage options available everywhere”; (iii) “transforming marketing and messages about nutrition and activity”; (iv) “making schools a gateway to healthy weights”; and (v) “galvanizing employers and health care professionals to support healthy lifestyles.” Included in these goals are specific recommendations that address, among other things, sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, the availability of lower-calorie children’s meals in restaurants, nutritional labeling, and food and beverage marketing to children.…
Reuters has issued a “special report” titled “How Washington went soft on childhood obesity” that details how food and beverage industry interests have allegedly turned aside national and statewide initiatives aimed at addressing childhood obesity. According to the article, “[a]t every level of government, the food and beverage industries won fight after fight during the last decade. They have never lost a significant political battle in the United States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of unhealthy food and children’s marketing in obesity.” A number of industry critics, including Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity Director Kelly Brownell, and Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) Executive Director Michael Jacobson, are quoted making comparisons between the tactics used by the food and beverage industries and those used by tobacco companies. The report focuses on first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which has…
The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM’s) executive officer has co-authored a book examining America’s obesity epidemic. Judith Salerno’s The Weight of the Nation: To Win We Have to Lose was published to complement a four-part HBO documentary on obesity debuting May 14-15, 2012, and a national campaign to curb obesity rates, both of which were featured in Issue 423 of this Update. The book was co-written by the documentary’s executive producer, John Hoffman, and its co-producer, Alexandra Moss. According to IOM, the book explores “the array of factors that feed America’s obesity problem—from the human body itself, which evolved to crave more food than it needs, to restaurant portion sizes that pack a day’s worth of calories into one meal, to neighborhoods and workplaces that encourage little physical activity.” IOM also plans to release a report titled “Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Weight of…
A recent study attempting “to isolate the causal effect of junk food availability on children’s food consumption and body mass index (BMI)” has concluded that access to competitive foods in schools “does not significantly increase BMI or obesity among this fifth-grade cohort despite the increased likelihood of in-school junk food purchases.” Ashlesha Datar and Nancy Nicosia, “Junk Food in Schools and Childhood Obesity,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Spring 2012. According to the researchers, who used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Class as well as an instrumental variables (IV) approach leveraging “the well-documented fact that junk foods are significantly more prevalent in middle and high schools relative to elementary schools,” the results evidently revealed that where previous models had identified “any small positive associations” between junk food availability and obesity, those associations became insignificant “when controls for BMI at school entry and fixed state effects are added.”…
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the owner and operator of a long-term residential treatment facility for chemically dependent women and their children has agreed to pay $125,000 to the estate of an employee allegedly terminated from her position because she was severely obese. EEOC v. Res. for Human Dev., Inc., No. 10-03322 (E.D. La., consent decree entered April 10, 2012). Additional information about the court decision denying the employer’s motions for summary judgment and recognizing obesity as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) appears in Issue 421 of this Update. EEOC also indicated that under the consent decree, the employer will “provide annual training on federal disability law to all human resources personnel and corporate directors of RHD [Resources for Human Development] nationwide.” The agreement further requires the company to report to EEOC “for three years on all complaints of disability discrimination and…
Researchers with the Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute at the University of California, Davis, have published a study claiming that maternal metabolic conditions (MCs) during pregnancy “may be broadly associated” with neurodevelopment problems, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in children. Paula Krakowiak, et al., “Maternal Metabolic Conditions and Risk for Autism and Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders,” Pediatrics, April 2012. The authors apparently analyzed data from children ages 2-5 years enrolled in the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) study, focusing on 517 children diagnosed with ASD, 172 with developmental delays (DD) and 315 controls. The results evidently suggested that not only were diabetes, hypertension and obesity “more common among mothers of children with ASD and DD compared with controls,” but mothers with obesity “were 67 percent more likely to have a child with ASD than normal-weight mothers without diabetes or hypertension, and were more than twice as…
Citizens Medical Center, located in Victoria, Texas, has reportedly instituted a prohibition on hiring any employee with a body mass index (BMI) higher than 35, or 210 pounds for an individual 5 feet, 5 inches tall or 245 pounds for someone 5-foot-10. Apparently, the hiring policy is not based on the expense of health care for the obese or purported increased absenteeism, but linked to physical appearance. The center’s chief executive officer reportedly said in an interview, “The majority of our patients are over 65, and they have expectations that cannot be ignored in terms of personal appearance.” Because weight is not a protected category in Texas, some believe the policy is not illegal, but others claim the weight-based discrimination violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. In either event, while smokers have been subject to similar policies for some time, weight restrictions are apparently virtually unknown in the medical field. The…
A New York University School of Medicine study claims that Body Mass Index (BMI), the traditional method used to measure obesity, may underestimate the number of Americans who actually qualify as obese. Nirav Shah and Eric Braverman, “Measuring Adiposity in Patients: The Utility of Body Mass Index (BMI), Percent Body Fat, and Leptin,” PLoS One, April 2, 2012. The researchers used BMI and a test called Dual- Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry (DXA), which provides simultaneous measurements of muscle, bone mass and body fat while measuring levels of leptin, a protein that regulates metabolism, on a cross section of 1,394 patients. According to the study, 48 percent of the women and 25 percent of the men were misclassified as non-obese based on BMI but were considered obese based on DXA testing. The researchers concluded that people who have lost a lot of muscle mass as they age, many of whom are women,…
Researchers studying 30,000 adult Mayo Clinic employees, retirees and dependents over a seven-year period have concluded that health care costs for the morbidly obese are far higher than those for smokers. James Moriarty, et al., “The Effects of Incremental Costs of Smoking and Obesity on Health Care Costs Among Adults,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, March 2012. The study found that health care costs for smokers exceed those for nonsmokers by $1,274 to $1,401 depending on retirement status, i.e., age, and health care costs for the overweight and obese (ranging from simply overweight to morbidly obese II) exceed those for individuals with normal body mass index by $382 to $5,530. The incremental costs are significantly higher at higher weight categories. While controlling for comorbidities, the researchers found lower incremental costs for obesity, but suggested that such controls “may lead to underestimation of the true incremental costs because obesity is…
