In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Dr. David Ludwig to discuss the misconceptions around obesity. Ludwig believes that while our individual genes affect our predisposition to obesity, it’s our environment (the foods we're exposed to daily) that’s really responsible for most of the obesity epidemic in America. He also shares his point of view on low-fat diets and what sugar is really doing to public health. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We have created a generation that, for the first time in human history, basically doesn't know how to cook.
They've abdicated that responsibility to the food industry.
So historically, children's food was made by people who knew them and loved them, and their well-being was close at heart.
Today, most food that kids eat are prepared by people whose main motivation is profit.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. - Bye.
We're speaking with Dr. David Ludwig from Children's Hospital in Boston.
He's co-founder and director of the Optimal Weight for Life program and author of the new book, Ending the Food Fight, Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food, Fake Food World.
And Children's Hospital in Boston, for those of you who do not realize, this is one of the nation's premier institutions, a place that has been the home of many of our nation's medical leaders, especially obviously in the pediatric field, because this is a children's hospital.
But this is a wonderful weight loss clinic for kids.
It has done a lot of groundbreaking work, particularly in low-glycemic diets.
Now, what the heck, David?
By the way, thanks for joining us.
Pleasure to be here.
What does low-glycemic really mean?
Well, you know, for thousands of years, humans have been eating foods that take a while to digest and are slowly absorbed into the body, sustaining our satiety after a meal, that's the sense of fullness, and promoting good metabolism.
In the last 50 years, for two reasons, the glycemic index of our diet has increased.
And glycemic index is a technical term, but what it basically means is how food affects blood sugar.
Over the last 50 years, in part because of low-fat diets, the carbs in our diet have gone way up.
But even more importantly, the processing of those carbs has increased.
So whereas 50 years ago, grandma used to make steel-cut oats that took a half hour to prepare, but it also digested slowly and raised blood sugar slowly.
Today we're eating instant oats, or worse, Froot Loops, or the bagel with fat-free cream cheese.
These turn into sugar almost instantaneously in the body.
But what goes up must come down.
So while blood sugar may surge for 30 minutes after one of those meals, two hours later it's crashing below where it started.
even fasting.
And how do people feel when their blood sugar is crashing?
And with regard to a topic that I'm very interested in, obesity, they become hungry.
And we and others have shown that the same calories in a high glycemic form stimulate the consumption of hundreds of extra calories throughout the day.
Why is there a debate over this?
I mean, I know of the glycemic index from several of the books that some of which you've been involved in that have publicized that as a way that maybe we could start to lose weight by taking foods that were lower glycemic index foods.
You get that stable blood sugar that you're referring to.
Then a paper comes out and says, well, it's overstated.
In fact, carrots have a high glycemic index, but they're good for you.
You should eat them.
What's the debate?
Why can't simple things like this be agreed on?
Yeah.
Well, glycemic index is a technical term, and the science is clearly evolving.
In fact, the whole notion was proposed just in 1981. When we think about other nutritional factors like vitamins, many of them we've known for half a century or a century.
So the science is evolving.
The other issue is that as important as glycemic index or load is, no single dietary factor can ever define a healthful diet.
Not even the most ardent advocates of low-fat diets would say drink Coca-Cola all day long because it has zero grams of fat.
So sometimes the notion can be put into practice too simplistically, and that triggers a reaction from the nutritional establishment.
But the other thing is that it is a radical notion.
You know, for so many years, we were taught that if you don't want fat on your body, you shouldn't put fat into your body.
It makes sense, right?
So we were all following low-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-glycemic diets.
Many researchers built their careers on this notion.
And that...
Paradigm seems to be crashing down with the publication of many studies that show that the amount of fat relative to carbohydrate in our diet doesn't importantly affect our body weight.
We're trying to create a new nutritional paradigm.
And the concept of glycemic index remains controversial.
But I think in the next few years, there's going to be a growing consensus that whatever we call it, diets that are based on natural, whole, less processed foods that slowly release their nutrients into our body.
Best support, weight management, but also reduction of heart disease, diabetes risk.
And one other very interesting topic is ADD.
You know, attention deficit disorder has increased in prevalence with the obesity epidemic and with the glycemic impact of our diets.
Now, how would a 10-year-old boy feel sitting in social studies class at 11 o'clock in the morning after having that bagel and fat-free cream cheese with his blood sugar crashing to very low levels?
Is he going to be paying attention to the instructor sitting politely and concentrating?
medication such as retolin.
Now, I'm not saying that diet is the only cause of ADD.
Clearly, there are important genetic or other factors that increase risk, but why shouldn't diet affect not just our body weight, but our emotional and psychological and mental well-being?
Now, we just went into a couple of school systems in northern New Jersey, and I was asking a very similar question, and the teachers around the table hardly agreed that you could almost always predict what the child had for breakfast or for lunch, for that matter, by how they perform afterwards.
For the very reasons you stated, when they're all dozing off, At 10.30 in the morning because they got their sugar and caffeine high in the morning from their soft drink.
It's not hard to predict that.
And likewise, in the afternoon, when after a very high glycemic load lunch, they're passing out in a sugar coma at 2 in the afternoon.
Again, teachers are ineffective.
It makes it frustrating for them as well.
So some of these are technical concepts like glycemic index and load, and it's important that the scientists get that right.
But...
We try to reduce these concepts to very simple terms for patients and their families that come to our weight management program.
It's called the Optimal Weight for Life for Owl program.
And the way I'd like to describe it is even a five-year-old in less than five minutes can get this cold.
I asked them to tell me about what foods humans would have eaten while living in nature.
Or think back to perhaps imagining that you're a caveman.
What foods would you eat?
And five-year-olds quickly list a series of natural foods like vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, grains, beans, whole grain products, fish or meat.
And then I asked them, what are fake foods?
What are foods that come from a factory, usually highly processed in a package?
And then we'd look at their food diaries that they brought in preparation for the clinic visit.
And I asked them to circle all of the fake foods in their diet.
And sometimes three-fourths or 90% of their food diaries are circled.
And when they see that, and especially if they're involved in the process of identifying it, it can lead to a profound transformation and awareness, just like for many young kids seeing the movie Super Size Me.
Altered their eating habits around fast food.
Nobody thinks that fast food is healthy.
But why do people go on eating this stuff meal after meal, day after day?
That knowledge that we hold in our brain needs to be transformed into, so to speak, gut knowledge.
And when kids see it for themselves, for example, the movie, when they saw Morgan Spurlock throwing up after a fast food meal...
They get it.
And sometimes they'll give up fast food permanently.
I love that scene, by the way.
He's sitting, it reminded me of a trip Lisa and I took to France.
The Camembert story?
We were in the northern coast of Normandy and they had a lot of cheese there.
So we were going from place to place having lots of cheese.
And our oldest daughter, Daphne, she was probably about, I don't know, 10 or 12 then.
No, much younger.
She was like 6. She was journaling and she was writing, we just went to this place, had some cheese.
We just went to this place, had more cheese.
I just had more cheese.
I don't feel very good.
I think I'm going to throw up.
Next entry is, I did.
So Morgan's sitting in the car and he's forcing down...
Again, the movie's premise is that you're having fast foods only for 30 days.
And he's checked his blood counts beforehand.
He's going to monitor all this stuff.
So four or five days into the process of eating this food before he becomes adjusted to eating this junk.
He's eating it, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he just vomits.
And it's revolting, of course, to see it.
But then after that, he gets very comfortable eating the junk food.
It becomes okay.
He's always hungry for it, in fact.
Well, you also get addicted to it.
Exactly.
Even if it's not the food itself.
Actually, let me ask you that.
We think that fast food is high in fat, but if you look at the nutrient composition, it's actually much higher in high glycemic carbs than it is in fat.
We did an analysis of this about...
55 or 60% of it.
Well, you think of the soft drink, that's all sugar, right?
The bun is all refined starch that breaks into sugar instantaneously in the body.
The french fries.
How about the ketchup?
What's the first ingredient?
Sugar.
And then you get the pie at the end, you know, the little hot apple pies.
So let me ask, is the sugar addictive?
Well, you know, this is one of these really hot-button notions in nutritional science, and I have to tread carefully so that I don't get my colleagues upset with me.
A promising career ended in a 15-second jaunt.
You know, the other advantage of using this notion of glycemic impact of foods is that we realize that, first of all, all starches aren't good, but all sugars aren't bad.
What's the composition of fruit?
I mean, most of the nutrients, most of the calories in fruit is sugar.
But these are a variety of natural sugars, not just table sugar, sucrose.
And they're wrapped up in a package which is called fiber.
And those, even though it's sugar, it releases those nutrients slowly into the body.
So I don't think that sugar per se is the enemy.
However, the way it's been corrupted, its use has been perverted in the food industry by adding to all sorts of foods, some of which would never have had sugar historically, like bread.
It's adding an extremely poor quality of nutrient and bumping up the calorie load in a way that has, I think, a tremendous negative impact on public health.
So is sugar addictive?
High glycemic sugars, as they're being used in the United States today, I think can cause not just a psychological craving for it, but it can cause swings in blood sugar and hormones that actually drive consumption.
We have a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
Lycemic Index is a concept that is the foundation of books like South Beach Dye, Sugar Buster's, I mean, a lot of diets that I have friends that have been on and seem to be effective for them in losing weight.
But there are folks out there who feel that thin people are just lucky.
And they're often the heavier folks.
And of course, the thin people think the fat people are just lazy lugs.
So if you sort of combine those two thoughts together, they come down to some basic biologic battles.
And one concept that's been thrown out is the thrifty gene.
Right.
Yay, nay.
Is that really an important problem?
Well, do genes affect our body weight?
Absolutely.
And that has been the front lines of research for most of the last 30 years in obesity.
But clearly, our genes aren't causing the obesity epidemic.
How do we know that?
Well, unless you're living precariously close to a nuclear power plant, your genes haven't changed very much in the last 30 years.
And yet obesity rates have tripled in children and tripled in adults and continue on upward.
So genes affect an individual's predisposition, their vulnerability to what's been called the toxic environment.
But it's the environment that has caused this epidemic.
Another way of looking at that is that if you could transport children today back to the environmental conditions that existed in the United States in the 1960s, most of the epidemic would go away.
Now, we don't have a time machine available, but our program and the book that we have just published aims to show a way to create those protective environmental conditions in the home.
Ultimately, we hope that we can transform the world into a healthier place to support children and families.
But until we do, we can create a bubble of protection around children in the home.
Can I ask you a relatively provocative question?
Do you have kids?
That's not the provocative question.
Well, there's two answers.
You know, I have thousands of them.
Okay.
So that's fine.
And the other answer is that I'm happy to say I'm engaged to be married for the first time.
Congratulations.
I managed to make it to my 40s.
Wonderful.
And we're hoping to.
And I'll actually become a stepdad soon.
Congratulations.
And we're hoping to have maybe one or two others.
Wonderful.
Well, that wasn't my provocative question.
Observing the children, the thousands of them that you treat, do they eat significantly differently than you did when you were 13, 15?
Because when we were growing up, there was still fast food.
I remember, I grew up in Philly, I could eat two hoagies as a 13-year-old.
Ridiculous, or this big.
I can eat barely half of one now.
Are kids really eating differently than we did when we were growing up?
Well, back, you know, you're probably about 24, so I'm not sure how to compare the eras.
I think we're the same age.
You know, in the 70s, fast food was an occasional treat.
And, importantly, families cooked at home.
Today, fast food has become a rate daily, sometimes many times a day.
And I think the single most disturbing trend is that we have created a generation that for the first time in human history basically doesn't know how to cook.
They've abdicated that responsibility to the food industry.
So, historically, children's food was made by people who knew them and loved them and their well-being was close at heart.
Today, most food that kids eat...
Are prepared by people whose main motivation is profit, not the well-being of the child.
And in a certain sense, the obesity epidemic is almost the logical outcome of that choice.
But I do want to say that I think reestablishing a relationship to food and cooking many meals at home is going to be essential to answering the obesity epidemic, but it doesn't have to be hard.
It doesn't have to be a choice between fast food takeout on one hand and a two-hour relationship French gourmet Julia Child type meal on the other.
There are simple ways of preparing food, especially on a weekend, and then reusing them throughout the week that can make healthy eating easy and fun.
Well, the provocative part of my question is...
Oh, we haven't even gotten to that yet?
No, I'm sorry to hijack this question.
No, I was waiting for it.
I wanted to hear it.
Do you think there's a possibility that what we're putting in our food could be contributing to the obesity epidemic, namely growth hormone?
Our farmers specifically feed their livestock foods to make them get fatter faster.
Is there any way that's being translated into our food sources?
Well, there are things we're putting into our food that are absolutely causing the obesity epidemic.
I would put way above on the list Things like trans fatty acids, hydrogenated fats, high fructose corn syrup, and the long list of extremely high-calorie, poor-quality foods.
Now, the hormones, both the ones that would be added to the food supply through animals or other...
And hormonally related substances that could actually be directly added to the food.
And the natural hormones that exist in animals that are going to be concentrated due to modern farming practices could, in theory, play a role.
There isn't a lot of research.
But I'll mention one example.
For thousands of years, humans have consumed dairy.
But those animals would have been milked through part of the year.
And then when they got pregnant...
The milking would have stopped.
Their milk would have dried up.
The animal would have had a calf who would have suckled.
And then for the next few months, milk would be available.
Today, due to modern industrial dairy practices, animals are being milked throughout their pregnancy.
And we all know what happens to these hormone levels.
During pregnancy, in a woman or in a dairy cow, the estrogen and progesterone triple or quadruple.
That goes right into the milk.
And so we're consuming milk that is basically different from the ones that humans would have eaten for centuries.
So could that be promoting earlier puberty in girls, as we've seen?
Could it be increasing risk for cancer that manifests itself throughout a lifetime?
There is, in fact, research now that links...
Dairy consumption with prostate cancer in men and potentially other kinds of cancers.
Okay, that was my question.
Thank you.
How did I do?
Perfect.
You can have the show back now, Mamet.
I've been set up.
The other thing Lisa always asks about is whether homogenation is a process that's detrimental to our well-being.
Any insights on that?
I don't have any data about that.
I think it's usually done electrically, basically breaks up the fat globules into such small little particles that it then distributes throughout the water part of the milk, and it doesn't separate.
But when your body would break it down, when the bile would attach to the fat to break it down in the milk, you can't do that anymore because there's a hydrogen bond there on that fat.
Well, homogenization does not hydrogenate the fat.
Those are different processes.
Hydrogenation of fat is the...
The single most toxic thing that's happened to the food supply in the last 50 years.
There's no question about it.
Every cell in the body is surrounded by a fat-containing membrane.
So every time that a cell needs to signal with its neighbor, every hormone, every neurologic process takes place through that vital cell membrane.
Humans...
Most animals would never have these trans fatty acids.
It's a fat that has an unusual kink and it alters membrane fluidity.
It basically could affect every biological process in the body.
And so, in a certain sense...
It's not at all surprising that trans fatty acids, this hydrogenated fat so prevalent in fast food that Commissioner Frieden is trying to get rid of, that that would affect not just the risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease, but neurological problems, body weight, cancers, and the like.
Let me just follow up on two points that you made.
The first is high fructose corn syrup, which you listed as one of the ingredients that's been added to the food supply.
I made a comment along those lines in a recent Oprah show, and as I always do, I get the usual emails from everybody complaining and moaning and groaning from the different trade associations.
And there are more trade associations than you can imagine.
There's a simple carbohydrate trade association.
I can't imagine getting together and saying, let's get all the, there's actually a refined wheat trade association.
But there's also the high fructose corn syrup team.
By the way, these are not, I don't think, evil people.
They are smart folks who firmly believe that the science doesn't justify us giving them a hard time.
And the high fructose corn syrup folks, in a series of letters back and forth, a good amount of data they sent to me, argue that high fructose corn syrup is 55%.
The sucrose and of the fructose.
And as opposed to regular sugar, that's 50%.
Sounds like thank you for smoking if you ask me.
Maybe.
So it's 10% more.
And they've sent me a bunch of articles arguing that there's not that much of a difference between high fructose corn syrup and regular table sugar.
You agree?
Well, I'm not frequently in agreement with the Refined Wheat Growers Association or the High Fructose Corn Syrup Lobbying Council.
But on this point, I do agree, to a point.
I think there's a tremendous misunderstanding about this product.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is, well, sucrose, which is table sugar.
historically made from wheat sugarcane and now made from beets and other things, is two molecules linked together, one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose.
fructose.
And now the body can break that bond in an instant.
And now the body can break that bond in an instant.
So it's basically like drinking, if you drink a sugar solution, it's like drinking half glucose and half fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is got just a little bit more fructose.
And it's also completely unclear that fructose is worse than glucose.
Are we getting technical enough?
No, it's good.
So they're right.
There is no difference.
But that doesn't leave them off the hook.
You know, it's not that high fructose corn syrup is as good as table sugar.
It's that table sugar is as bad as high fructose corn syrup.
And the additional problem is that this product has made sugar so phenomenally cheap.
Together with the farm subsidies, the number one product is of course corn, corn for high fructose corn syrup.
It's become so phenomenally cheap that there's this tremendous incentive for the food industry to add it to the least likely places of our food supply and to find selling soft drinks, which is just a high fructose corn syrup solution, so immensely profitable.
Would you recommend your patients to drink diet sodas?
This is a situation which I describe as good, better, best.
I think as a first step to get off of sugar-sweetened beverages, diet beverages, clearly, no debate, are better for body weight.
But I have some concerns about it.
One is that It creates a separation between two linked biological processes.
Normally when we taste something sweet, our blood sugar rises, and we secrete insulin, and our body expects blood sugar to rise.
Artificial sweeteners uncouple that.
So we taste sweetness, and our body can start releasing a little bit of insulin, but our blood sugar doesn't go up.
So it could cause this mismatch in our metabolism, and that could have some...
Unhealthy effects from metabolism.
But the other thing I really worry about is what I call the infantilization of our taste buds.
You know, kids are born with an innate preference for sugar, fat, and salt.
And over time, those preferences mature.
Otherwise, if they didn't, kids would have starved to death once they were weaned off of breast milk.
The consumption of so much highly intensively sweetened foods keeps children craving These primary flavors.
And so they never develop a willingness or a tolerance to eat more healthful foods.
I must say, I'm so stimulated by this conversation, not only because you express it quite beautifully, but also these are practical insights that I can just see you delivering in the clinic in Boston Children's Hospital to all the folks who are now able to benefit from you.
We're speaking with Dr. David Ludwig.
He's at Children's Hospital in Boston, the co-founder and director of the Optimal Weight for Life program and author of the new book, Ending the Food Fight, Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast-Food, Fake-Food World.
There's last more to come after the break. - Let me just start off with a point that you made just before the break.
If you look at the maturity speed Yeah.
Young girls are a good example because they start to develop larger breasts, they develop pubic hair, start to have menses.
They start to menstruate, now eight, nine years of age.
Is this something that's from the food supply, you think?
And if so, what are the culprits?
Yeah, well, it's quite clear that the age of menarche, the girl first has her period, has been declining throughout the last century.
Some of that has been due to just improved nutrition.
So an undernourished girl will have delayed pubertal development.
The body seems to need a certain amount of fat, a critical amount of fat, to send a signal to the girl's brain, go through puberty.
So then that makes sense, doesn't it?
Because you wouldn't want to initiate a pregnancy unless you had enough energy stores where the infant wouldn't survive and the mother might not either.
So up until the 1960s or so, I think that decline has to do with positive developments in the food supply.
Like people are getting enough protein now.
But since the 60s, something else has happened.
That decline has continued beyond what I think is the normal natural age for a girl to begin puberty, which is starting breast development at around 10 1��2 and then periods around 12.
We see, especially in Hispanic and African American girls, initiation of puberty at age seven, sometimes six.
So what's causing this?
Probably the obesity epidemic explains most of it.
When an individual, and especially a child, is obese, their hormones become exacerbated.
And what I mean by that, there's something called insulin resistance.
You may have heard of that before.
That's when someone has too much fat in their body, the ability to process this hormone insulin is decreased.
So the body increases that hormone level to compensate.
That's called insulin resistance.
But insulin is one of the most potent growth factors in the body.
And so this may explain why obesity is linked to not just excessive growth, so obese kids go through puberty early and tend to grow faster, but there's also an increased risk for cancer.
Because insulin stimulates the growth and development of tissues throughout the body.
What about some of the other arguments that have been made?
Lisa kept pestering you earlier about the hormones in our milk and our beef.
Are those in high enough doses?
The fact that we're drinking milk year-round from cows that perhaps had been pregnant at the time they were being milked.
Are these all possible explanations?
Are these sort of outlandish?
I mean, your endocrinologist is an area that I would trust your advice on just about more than anybody else's.
Well, it's hard to know.
It certainly could be a contributor, and I would absolutely not discount it as part of the picture.
But my sense is that, first and foremost, the obesity epidemic, you know, that's the base of the iceberg.
And that's probably explaining most of what's going on.
And we know that obesity, you know, there was this debate a few years ago about whether obesity and its effects on mortality may have been overestimated.
Now, that's clearly due to problems with the study, and we can go through that if you want.
Studies since then have absolutely demonstrated that the heavier a person is, the greater the risk, not just for diabetes and heart disease, but for mortality throughout life.
So that, you know, that has to be addressed.
Beyond that, hormones in the food or another area for you to worry about is pollutants that are in the category of endocrine disruptors.
Most of the things we throw into landfills have some kind of petroleum base to them.
And many of these products look like hormones in the body.
And they leach into the water supply, even just, you know, to really cause a little paranoia here, just pulling off plastic.
What if you microwave in plastic?
Microwaving in plastic or just storing foods in plastic for long periods of time.
You know, these substances leach into the foods.
Now, in small doses, once in a while, yeah, we're both drinking bottled water and plastic.
Happily, they're not sugar-sweetened beverages.
Yeah.
But in small doses, it almost certainly isn't a big problem.
But day after day, throughout our diet, our water supply, could it be explaining the dramatic increases in breast cancer and some neurodegenerative diseases?
It's possible.
When you speak of the neuro disruptors, you mentioned the plastics.
There are others as well.
Are there particular ones that you worry about more than others?
Let me ask you more practically.
If you're giving one of your upcoming stepchildren advice on endocrine disruptors, would you say stop drinking water out of a bottle?
What are the precautions that are practical?
Well, again, it's good, better, best.
You know, if it's a choice between a sugar-sweetened beverage and water out of a plastic bottle, you know, of course drink water out of the plastic bottle.
And I'm not saying that bottled water is a major source of concern.
But let's remember that we have come a long way from eating foods that came directly from nature, grown locally, prepared fresh, you know, and cooked in natural...
Pots and wear pots.
Yeah, iron pots and all that.
And we just don't know how each of the thousands of chemicals we're exposed to.
And perhaps more concerningly, the interactions, the millions of interactions between each of these thousands of chemicals, what they might be doing for us.
So my advice...
Well, you know, it's funny, you know, going to medical school, you see so many diseases.
And if you have a slightly neurotic personality like I do, you know, you think you have basically every disease that you see in medical school.
We all do.
I had leukemia twice, by the way.
Yeah, yes.
And the only upside of it is when you get really worried about a disease, you learn all about it.
And so then I become very empathic about patients who happen to have it.
Because I've, in a certain sense, worried about having it too.
But, you know, we can't live our lives in paranoia.
So give me just one or two little tidbits that you might tell your kids.
I think the most important thing is to focus on eating a whole foods natural diet.
That is, again, the base of the iceberg.
Why worry about the tip of the iceberg when it's the base that's going to sink the Titanic here?
Let's get away from all of these processed, factory-produced, what we call fake foods.
Let's base our diet on things that humans have been consuming since the dawn of our species.
And if possible...
Consistent with our overly busy lifestyle.
Prepare some of them at home.
Have a family meal so that we can nourish our children's bodies and also their spirits with good conversation around the dinner table.
We're here with Dr. David Ludwig from Children's Hospital in Boston.
His new book, Ending the Food Fight, which is a guide, as you're describing, for kids to navigate that serpentine path between fast food and fake food.
What are the parenting insights you can share for folks?
I mean, I got the food stuff.
There's probably a whole...
A show we could do just on physical activity and getting kids to think differently about the role they play in the process.
Well, for many families in America today, weight loss can seem a lot like warfare.
Ironically, so much energy can go into conflict that there's very little left over to actually deal with the weight problem.
One of the most common errors that I see parents making is that they raise young children excessively, too leniently, too permissively.
Young children, in the absence of clear guidelines and limits from their parents about what and how to eat, will learn eating habits from our fast food culture, and especially the incessant food advertising to kids.
So they develop these atrocious eating habits, and more likely than not, they'll gain too much weight.
By the time they reach adolescence and the doctor says that the kid is at risk for developing type 2 diabetes...
The parents understandably become very worried.
But the same parents that were too lenient with the young kids now try to clamp down in inappropriate ways.
And that makes a bad situation worse.
Because whereas young children need guidance, they're programmed to learn from their parents.
They're developmentally willing and able to learn from their parents.
Adolescents are a bit of the opposite.
They need empowerment.
They need to feel responsible and independent to a growing degree.
And in fact, their future survival is dependent upon their ability to make decisions on their So when parents start to use coercive methods, like excessively restricting some foods, pressuring their kids to eat other foods, or even punishment, criticism, incessant nagging, this just causes conflict.
Did you hear that, Lisa?
This incessant nagging part?
I knew you were referring to that part.
I knew it.
Is this for both husbands and children or just children?
Some women would argue that there's no distinction.
Yeah, yeah.
You're just getting married, obviously.
It's still an away game for you.
So the key here is age-appropriate parenting practices that can help convert conflict into cooperation.
We need to be raising young kids with clear limits and boundaries.
If a parent can't say no to some things, like the gallon of ice cream in the supermarket, they're not going to be able to say yes to other things, like feeling good and good health.
Well, the parent also has to set an example, because you can tell your kid, no, you can't have the ice cream, and then you sit down and eat the half-gallon yourself.
Okay, so let's talk about what we call the two pillars of parenting.
The first is protecting the home environment.
The basic idea here is, if it doesn't support health, don't bring it in the home, which doesn't mean that you have to give up treats and sweets entirely.
Go out for ice cream once in a while and make it a celebration.
But you can say no once in the supermarket when your kids are asking you for it, or you can try to say no every night when they nag you for it if it's sitting in the freezer.
So instead, stock the home with nutritious and delicious foods that support everybody's health.
So the beauty of this approach is that whenever a child or any family member is in the home, They're going to be moved toward health in distinction to when they're out in society or unfortunately in the schools when the opposite is all too often the case.
This helps the overweight child lose weight.
It protects the lean child from developing a weight problem in the future.
And the parents' high cholesterol or high blood pressure probably improve as well.
The second key parenting practice is modeling.
You know how little kids...
Like a little girl will see her mother sweeping the floor and she'll want to pick up the room and sweep too.
She doesn't know it's a chore.
She doesn't know that she's not supposed to like doing it.
She sees her mother doing it and she wants to do it.
Young kids are programmed like little ducklings imprint upon their mother.
Young kids are programmed to learn from their parents.
Let's take advantage of this by modeling helpful behaviors.
The kids will learn those behaviors and they will stay ingrained for life.
Now, modeling the power here is that sometimes parents will do something for their kids that they wouldn't do for themselves.
So, the kids benefit, but they benefit too.
I was struck that you gave one very concrete bit of advice, which was to have breakfast, which I was sort of surprised by, actually.
It just seemed like it wasn't equally important as the other points, but as I've done my own research in this area, I appreciate why you're saying that.
Why do you focus on breakfast?
Why not focus on lunch or dinner?
Well, breakfast is, you know, they say it's the most important meal of the day, and whoever they are, they're probably right.
You know, kids have been...
Anybody.
By the time breakfast rolls around, we've been fasting for 10, 12, 14 hours from our last meal.
And hormones in the body that relate to stress and starvation rise early in the morning.
If we don't put food into our body, if we don't fuel our metabolism at that point, that starvation response continues to mount throughout the morning.
It flips a switch in the brain.
Once that happens and the brain thinks, wait a second...
Emission control, we have a problem.
It upregulates hunger throughout the day.
So one of the, you know, what we call the SAD, the standard adolescent diet, you know, is to roll out of bed last thing in the morning, don't eat anything till lunch, probably eat one of these atrocious school lunches, which is just a disguise for a fast probably eat one of these atrocious school lunches, which is just a And then throughout the afternoon and evening, be gorging, overeating.
And that sets up this vicious cycle where the kid then winds up sick to his stomach in the morning and doesn't want breakfast.
Right.
In that situation, weight loss can almost be impossible.
We're working against our biology.
The goal of our work in this book and our research is to line up biology with behavior.
When you get biology right, the effort you put into behavior change propels you forward.
If you don't, you put in all this energy and it's just like spinning your wheels.
So the first step to get out of that cycle is to begin just a tiny little breakfast.
Just even one apple.
Or an orange.
And then slowly eat a little less at night.
And then over a week or two, begin to increase breakfast and decrease the late evening eating.
And lastly, I want to say that breakfast doesn't have to be a production.
