There’s No Pill To Replace A Healthy Lifestyle
Earlier this week National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute issued new guidelines for testing cholesterol levels in children. They recommended all children ages 9 to 11 should be screened at least once for high cholesterol.
The new recommendations were spurred by the increase in childhood obesity which is accompanied by high cholesterol and heart disease later in life. The early testing is intended to prevent heart disease in adulthood-children don’t have heart attacks.
This recommendation makes no sense to me, because unless the kids have a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol — such as familial hyperlipidemia — we’re not going to put children on cholesterol-lowering medicines, are we? We’re going to tell their parents that their kids need to loose weight-why do we need cholesterol levels to do this. Fat kids leads to fat adults which results in hear disease and diabetes.
What we should be doing instead of measuring cholesterol is promoting lifestyle changes to reduce childhood obesity. A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that obese children who lost weight as adults lowered their risk of heart disease and diabetes to the levels observed in adults who never had problems with their weight.The key is a healthy lifestyle. Reduce calories consumed and increase calories expended!
So, if we can all get on the same page and, for example, serve children healthier school lunches (which our congressmen don’t believe they deserve since they rejected a proposal by the Department of Agriculture to replace starchy foods on school lunch menus with fruits and vegetables), and make sure they exercise 30 minutes a day, they’ll stay healthy and not be at increased risk for developing heart disease later in life.
There’s no magic pill to replace living a healthy lifestyle.
[Photo By Gilabrand]