New Scary Statistics

According to an article in Diabetes Care the number of pregnant women with pre-existing diabetes has doubled in just 6 years.

This was no small study either. The study looked at 175,249 women ages 13-58 years with 209,287 deliveries of 20 weeks gestation from 1999 through 2005.

Back in 1999 only 10% of children born to diabetic mothers were born to moms with pre-existing diabetes (90% were in moms who developed gestational, or during pregnancy, diabetes). By 2005, that number climbed to 21%.

Even more alarming?

The number of diabetic teenagers giving birth rose more than 5 fold.

Yup, diabetic teenagers.

We sure can't call it "adult-onset" any longer. Perhaps we should call it "nutritional" or "weight-related" diabetes?

Condemning your child to being overweight?

On the newsfeeds today is a story about linking your future child's weight to the weight you might gain during pregnancy. What the study found was the children of women who gained more weight during pregnancy had a higher likelihood of being overweight at age 3.

The conclusions being drawn on the newsfeeds is that the issue of obesity in North America must therefore be due to weight gain during pregnancy. The fact is there are literally thousands of variables that affect weight and even more that affect eating behaviour.

Interestingly the only controls mentioned in the experiements were for race, parental smoking, household income and fetal growth during pregnancy. The only control I would want to know about is the eating habits of the household to begin with because guess what, children eat what parents buy and if the household has calorie dense choices, parental inactivity and poor nutritional education that's far more of a culprit in childhood obesity than anything else.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18825284.300

By far the best way to help your children is to live well yourself and let them learn from you.