Is BMI meaningless, especially for kids?
Mar 4, 2010 Kids, Weight Loss
I was quoted this morning in a piece on ABCNews.com about tracking kids’ health through the use of BMI. An adult’s BMI is calculated using height and weight, and that number puts you in the underweight, normal, overweight, or obese category. It doesn’t take into account muscle mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, sugar levels, activity levels, waist size, or any other indicator of health and fitness.
And when you start talking about BMI for kids, it gets more complicated, because a BMI that’s considered OK for a ten-year-old is obese for a seven-year-old. I don’t think using BMI to track kids’ health is a good idea at all. (However, unlike most of the commenters on the ABC piece, I don’t think trying to improve kids’ health is a commie-liberal-big brother idea either – those commenters get paranoid and nutty pretty fast.) [Please note: the comments link has been working on and off all day; the link is correct, it's a problem with ABCNews.com.] Whether a kid is healthy or not is complicated. My son was in the top 5% on the BMI charts for a seven-year-old when he was seven, which is what triggered the note home. The problem is that the kids’ charts compare kids by age. My son was towering over the other kids in his class, so the comparison was completely out of whack. The charts allow for the fact the older kids are supposed to have a higher BMI, but not for kids who are very tall for their age.
It’s just one of those things where a number or a label without information is useless. I knew the assessment was ridiculous, but had to actually look up the info and explain the BMI-by-age concept to The Ass to talk him down after he saw the letter. He’s not a stupid guy. He’s actually quite smart, smarter than me in many ways. But the government told him his son was obese and he took them at their word. That’s a problem on many levels.
What’s the answer? I have no clue. I’m lucky that I have one kid who chooses to eat like a health nut and another who is active enough that he burns off the huge amount of carbs that he consumes. If one of them had a health problem I would expect my doctor to talk to me about it. He’s got all of my kids’ information right there in front of him, and even more important, he’s got my kids right in front of him. Does he need the government’s guidance talking to me about my kids’ weights? I don’t think so, but if they’re going to tell him anything, I’d rather it be something useful, like whether or not my kids can run and play with their classmates and how they do on fitness tests. What their blood tests should look like. And yes, whether their measurements are in a safe range, based on many factors. Using one number to target kids will include kids who don’t need the intervention and exclude kids who actually need the help.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
When Is A Popsicle More Than Just A Popsicle?
Jun 28, 2008 What's Going On
No, I’m not talking about anything Freudian. For my husband and me, the Popsicles that I bought yesterday have become a source of contention.
My husband and I used to fight about one thing only: money. We’d have skirmishes here and there about other things, but if I were to list our top ten biggest fights, fights about money would be at least eight of the ten. But recently, for the past four months or so, we’ve been having huge fights about what the kids are eating.
I’ve had issues with my weight since I was about 18 or 19. For years it was just the same 20 pounds or so, but since I was trying to get jobs as an actress, that 20 pounds might as well have been 200. Then I had kids, and I just ballooned up. I’ve taken some off in the past year, but still have a ways to go. And I’ve been trying to pay close attention to why I eat too much. If I only ate when I was hungry, I think I could eat pretty much anything and be an OK weight. But I eat whether I’m hungry or not, and continue eating way past the point of being full. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. When I was a kid it was OK because I was running around all the time. But in my late teens, it all started to catch up with me.
After much introspection and observation, I realized that I was mostly eating out of fear: fear that the food wouldn’t be there tomorrow. When I was little, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house. She would buy me any foods I wanted, and I lived on a diet of Jeno’s mini pizzas, ice cream, sugary cereals, and peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread (or so I’m told). I ate as much as I could, as often as I could, because I knew that when I went back to my parents house, it was going to be all carob and tofu and brown bread. It probably wasn’t as bleak as all that, but that’s how I saw it as a kid. I was insanely jealous of friends whose houses were packed with junk foods.
So, I would feast, in anticipation of the famine. And years later, when our house was filled with a bigger variety of foods, and I had control over what I was able to eat, I was still eating as though the “good stuff” was going to be taken away. And as I got older, and wasn’t on sports teams any more, and got a car, and money for eating out, the pounds starting coming on.
I don’t want my kids to grow up with the same food issues that I have, but we’re sending them down the same path. I try to give them as much leeway as I can with what they eat, without totally going against what my husband wants them to eat. But as they get older, it’s becoming more of a problem. I can see them attacking food and eating and eating and eating, and not even paying attention to whether or not they’re full. My son craves white bread and pasta and chocolate all the time. I think he should get it all the time. Eventually, he’ll get sick of it. But The Ass (that’s how I’m going to refer to him from now on, since that’s what I usually call him at home) thinks that’s horrible, that I’m encouraging bad eating behaviors.
It’s not like I think eating white bread and pasta and chocolate all the time are good for Jake, but I also know that the more we try to get him to eat other foods, the more he’s going to want what he wants. My husband is a raging liberal, but in this case I think he’s using a very conservative kind of logic: do what you think is right, based on your principals, not what you think will get results. Just think teen pregnancy and condoms vs. abstinence, and you’ll get what I mean.
Fiona always wants ices and Fla-Vor-Ice pops and ice cream. So when she wanted Popsicles at the store yesterday, I picked out a big box of sugar-free, lo-cal ones. Personally, I believe in giving kids the real stuff, but I figured these would make The Ass happy and she wouldn’t have to beg and plead for them.
So today, she asked her Daddy for two, and he said no! And I was like “Really? The low-cal, sugar free Popsicles? She can’t have two?” And he said no, because that would be gluttony. Because she perceives it as a dessert, a treat, something to beg for and cherish. So letting her have two would send the wrong message.
I give up. The girl who loves broccoli and yogurt and baby carrots and fruit of all kinds can’t have two Popsicles, because that would be gluttony. But Jake the pasta boy had Oreos and chocolate chips, and that was OK. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
Tags: carob, Eating, Food, gluttony, Kids, popsicles, tofu, Weight, wonder bread
