Obesity Prevention . . Part 1

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A question that has arisen is can babies be obese? While doctors worry that the seeds of childhood obesity are being planted earlier and earlier, the good news is that parents can do something about it.

For ions, Americans have jumped for joy in celebrating chubby babies because of a mindset that says a chubby baby equates to a healthy baby. But that could be changing.

There has been a lot written about the rise in childhood obesity rates in the past 30 years but not much about how early the obesity cycle starts.

The bad news is that one out of every five 6 to 11 year olds in the US and 10 percent of 2 to 5 year olds are obese. What’s worse is that now newborns are showing signs of this impending disaster.

The basic problem is that, according to some professor of nutrition and public health at Yale, the problem of obesity gets transferred from one generation to the next.

So, if a mom is overweight or obese, that increases the likelihood that the baby could be born with a predisposition to be obese.

On top of that obese women are also more likely to have high blood pressure and gestational diabetes during pregnancy, which can constrict blood vessels and limit blood flow to the baby.

So, where does one start to give the kid a better shot at a healthier life?

For one, smoking reduces fetal growth. This equates to a low birth-weight baby, like an overweight newborn, being at a greater risk for obesity later in life.

One of the theories behind this is that when the baby “stops smoking”, they crave more food just like the adult does when they kick the habit making it so that the low birth-weight baby is programmed to store fat.

Then there’s the eating-for-two indoctrination. The current recommendation is that weight gains of 25 to 35 pounds for normal-weight women, 15 to 25 pounds for overweight women and 11 to 20 pounds for women who are obese, is the norm that should be followed during pregnancy.

What happens when a mother gains too much weight during pregnancy is that her fetus becomes a prisoner on the hormone environment in the womb and is exposed to high levels of blood sugar and insulin. Why? Because when the sugar crosses the placenta, the fetus’ pancreas senses a lot of it and makes too much insulin causing baby-poo to grow too fast.

We know from time to time that a C-section is necessary. In the case of obese women, they are delivering bigger babies and are more likely to require surgery,

Well, C-section babies have double the risk of obesity at age 3. What many do not know is that by not having a C-section, in non-obese women the bacteria in birth canal plays a role in reducing the risk of obesity.

Breastfeeding is the best because when bottle-fed, the mother worries that their baby is not consuming enough and want to see them finish the bottle. The end result is over-consumption.

The reality is that babies suck more easily from the bottle than from the nipple and when bottle-fed they will take in more than they need.

I often hear mothers bragging about how soon they got their child onto solid foods. Too bad they didn’t know that the earlier solid food is introduced the higher the obesity tendency.

The Yale guy published a paper showing that formula feeders who ate solid food before four months had a six-fold increase in obesity at age 3. The reason for this was that formula-feeding parents tend to feed to a schedule rather than to have the baby self-regulate.

A baby will unlatch from the breast when full or will appear to fall asleep and a toddler will play with their food, get antsy in the highchair climb down. Do not ignore the clues telling you they have had enough.

Then there’s the question of what the kid should drink? The theory is that babies and toddlers do not need juice because vitamin C deficiency is not a problem in the US. So the choices are unfluoridated water, mother’s milk or goat’s milk. Giving your kid pasteurized, bovine growth laden cow’s milk is a recipe for disaster.

Ditto for them, as they get older. Juice, sodas, Gatorade, PowerAde, sweet teas and other sugar laden garbage are simply drinks that provide empty calories and excess sugar that will take their toll over the following weeks, months and years that will leave nothing but unnecessary extra pounds.

If veggies are introduced first you will help your kid develop a taste for low-calorie, fiber-filled foods that leave them feeling full. When there is more bulk in the foods we consume, our bodies tend to be much better at controlling our impulses for consuming large amounts of calories.

It seems that babies who are introduced to unhealthy sweet foods first may develop a strong preference for them. It is so easy for a parent to bring immediate satisfaction to a crying baby by offering these foods that have a long-term adverse effect. Even the old standby Cheerios sucks because of the refined carbohydrates therein that definitely plays a role in weight gain. Take a walk on the wild side and try bananas, avocados and soft-cooked carrots cut into small pieces.

It was also observed that if infants sleep less than 12 hours, they have a two-fold increase in obesity three years later. To encourage good rest, put babies to bed in a quiet, dark room – without a bottle.

When I was a kid my mom used to use certain foods as a reward for good behavior. On me, that was such a waste. So don’t condition your kid that way. The same goes for the clean-plate club. Make him finish – make him gain weight. When the kid’s full, he or she is full. Don’t push it. And above all, in this sense, don’t use this ploy as a condition for dessert.

Last but not least, encourage movement from day one. Overweight babies can have a trickier time rolling around or sitting up because they are too heavy to have the musculature to hold themselves up.

Remember that babies spend a lot of time in strollers and car seats, strapped down and not able to move. You need to allow them to creep and crawl because it helps them develop muscles and it encourages achievement of motor milestones like walking.

So, what if you are an obese grown-up and don’t know what to do? Stay tuned! It will be the next article.

Aloha!

SOURCE:

“Better Health Through Natural Healing”: Dr. Ross Trattler

To learn more about Hesh, listen to and read hundreds of health related radio shows and articles, and learn about how to stay healthy and reverse degenerative diseases through the use of organic sulfur crystals and other amazing superfoods, please visit www.healthtalkhawaii.com, or email me at [email protected] or call me at (808) 258-1177. Since going on the radio in 1981 these are the only products I began to sell because they work.
Oh yeah, going to www.asanediet.com will allow you to read various parts of my book – “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”, containing a wonderful comment by Mike Adams.

Hesh Goldstein
When I was a kid, if I were told that I'd be writing a book about diet and nutrition when I was older, let alone having been doing a health related radio show for over 36 years, I would've thought that whoever told me that was out of their mind. Living in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I consumed anything and everything that had a face or a mother except for dead, rotting, pig bodies, although we did eat bacon (as if all the other decomposing flesh bodies were somehow miraculously clean). Going through high school and college it was no different. In fact, my dietary change did not come until I was in my 30's.

Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.

After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.

Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.

I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.

So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".

Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.

I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.

But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.

The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.

But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.

So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.

Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.

I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.

Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.

A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.

In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.

My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.

I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.

Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.

The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.

Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.

For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.

Namaste!