Bad food, lazing about put younger children at risk of heart disease - Sydney Morning Herald
"We are assuming the diet of normal weight children has deteriorated" ... Lana Bell, paediatrician. Photo: Peter Braig
AUSTRALIAN children as young as six have worryingly high levels of cholesterol, and healthy weight children seem to be at as much risk as overweight children, researchers say.
Poor diet and a lack of exercise could be putting children at risk of heart disease.
A study of 283 schoolchildren has found more than 60 per cent of healthy weight and overweight children had a condition called dyslipidaemia, which involves unhealthy levels of cholesterol.
It affected more than 70 per cent of obese children.
The study author, Lana Bell, said the research team was shocked to find high cholesterol levels among such young, healthy weight children.
"We are assuming that the diet of normal weight children has deteriorated … at the moment that is just a theory," she said.
Dr Bell, who is a paediatrician, regularly sees overweight and obese children suffering weight-related problems, although this was the first Australian study to show they existed at a wider level.
Nearly 20 per cent of obese children in the study had high blood pressure, 38 per cent had high levels of insulin in their blood and 5 per cent struggled to tolerate glucose - both precursors to diabetes.
Among overweight children nearly 20 per cent had high insulin levels, she wrote in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.
A senior research fellow at the Westmead millennium institute at the University of Sydney, Bamini Gopinath, said her research, which examined more than 1700 children from 34 Sydney schools, found, irrespective of weight, less exercise was linked to high blood pressure.
And more time spent in front of the television was associated with narrowed blood vessels behind children's eyes, an indicator of heart disease.
"What is emerging is modifiable risk factors like diet, screen viewing time and physical activity are very important risk factors for cardiovascular disease," she said.
She added there was enough evidence emerging on the health of children to justify serious policy changes such as limiting junk food advertising.
Rae-Chi Huang, a paediatrician and assistant research professor at the University of Western Australia, said the health effects of obesity were likely to follow children throughout their lives.
But she cautioned that as obesity and weight issues were much rarer in the past, definitions for what constituted high cholesterol among children were not set in stone. They were often based on adult definitions and as such had arbitrary cut-offs.
But she said that combined with other factors, such as high blood pressure, poor diet and poor exercise, they still gave an indication of risk.
12 Oct, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEgeJflUgOBw0bkD-N_uik33Zq7NA&url=http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/bad-food-lazing-about-put-younger-children-at-risk-of-heart-disease-20111012-1ll2m.html
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