Killer Diseases Begin with Childhood Nutrition

Growing Up Healthy
by Joan Lunden, Myron Winick, M.D.

Whether you're expecting or already parenting a child, you still have a chance to offer them the gift of a healthy, disease-free life.

In Growing Up Healthy, Joan Lunden, one of America's most trusted journalists and most visible working moms, teams up with Dr. Myron Winick, a leading expert in childhood nutrition, to produce a guide that contains the lifesaving knowledge we all need to shield our children from disease and help them grow into strong, fit adults.

Based on groundbreaking research that shows the link between childhood nutrition and "adult diseases" — including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, and cancer — Growing Up Healthy will teach you:

• how to choose foods that will boost your children's brainpower, fuel their growing bodies, and shield them against disease

• which foods influence our children's bodies during the years in which their cells are forming,and their organs and tissues are developing

• why growing children should not adhere to low-fat or low-carb diets

• how to create healthy life-long eating patterns that help prevent the onset of chronic illness

... and more. From first foods to fast foods, this comprehensive plan for childhood nutrition goes far beyond the basics to invite us all to give our children the gift of a life infused with good health and vitality.

Chapter 1

I'm a new mom all over again! And just as excited and in awe of the challenge of parenthood as I was first time around. My new twins Kate and Max share the cover of this book with me because they, along with children everywhere, now have an amazing opportunity to live longer, healthier lives, free of chronic disease. When I was raising Jamie, Lindsay, and Sarah, my three older daughters, I was constantly sifting through books and magazines in search of trustworthy pediatric health news, as I'm sure you are. Throughout my years as cohost on Good Morning America, parenting and the importance of sound childhood nutrition were subjects about which I was always passionate.

Now that my husband Jeff and I have been blessed with our amazing twins, I'm reminded that raising a child into a healthy, happy, and productive adult is one of the most rewarding things a person can do — and one of the most daunting. So, once again, I found myself searching for the latest findings on how to give a child the healthiest life possible. That's when I was introduced to renowed pediatric nutritionist Dr. Myron Winick, who headed up one of the most important studies in the area of childhood health and nutrition. The three-year task force commissioned by the American Health Foundation produced what just might be the most important medical breakthrough to come along in years: the definitive link between childhood nutrition and chronic illness in later life.

Dr. Winick contacted me to see if I would be interested in helping to get this vitally important news out to other parents. I had first met Dr. Winick in 1984 when I interviewed him on Good Morning America for his earlier book on feeding children, also entitled Growing Up Healthy. Those of us at Good Morning America found him to be such an effective communicator of this type of practical parenting advice that we invited him back on the program regularly. One of our country's leading experts in the field of pediatric nutrition, Dr. Winick later spearheaded the study to examine the significance of our children's diets on chronic illness. The task force findings showed that we as parents have it within our power to help protect our children from disease and very possibly lengthen their lives.

As a concerned parent, I feel privileged to pass along this information to parents everywhere. I think you will agree that it contains some of the most important health and nutritional findings to emerge in decades.

If you're like me, you too love your kids passionately and are eager to learn the secret to possibly lengthening their lives. You want them to be free from the killer diseases plaguing our society; you want them to be happy and blossom into strong, healthy adults; you want them to stay vigorous and fit into their nineties. (Did I say nineties? How about imagining our children as healthy centenarians!) Very simply, you don't want them to get sick! What you do want is to learn how to take control of their nutrition and give them the gift of a life infused with good health.

I know that you work hard, that you're probably pooped out, stressed out, and barraged with the latest information about what you should and shouldn't do for the care and feeding of your children — and who to trust. Believe me, I know, I'm right there with you. That's why I feel so lucky to have found Dr. Winick's research on nutrition, so as to better understand this link between our children's diets and adult disease. I feel that I'm arming myself with this lifesaving knowledge to help shield my children from illness and to help them grow into strong, fit adults.

Over the past year while I've been working on this book with Dr. Winick, I've had the opportunity to share much of this groundbreaking information with my older girls, Jamie, Lindsay, and Sarah. I can already see what a wonderfully healthy influence it's having on their behaviors. Which reminds me, that just as it's never too early to introduce healthy habits, it's never too late.

Like so many of us, I didn't learn my own personal nutrition lessons until somewhat later in life. While I always understood that my children needed a good foundation for growth and development, quite frankly, I didn't have one myself. It wasn't until I was almost forty that I started paying closer attention to my own fitness and nutrition and launched my own health odyssey. Actually, it was the constant interviews with health experts on the morning show that prompted me to wake up and get serious about my health. And so, I began an exercise program; I changed the way I ate; I lost fifty pounds; and I probably added twenty years to my life. I'd like to see children everywhere add years to their lives, too.

That's why I've come on board to be the voice for this exciting project: I want parents everywhere to become recipients of this most loving gift — an opportunity to give our children the best shot at growing up healthy and circumventing adult diseases.

This information is critically important for every family. By paying careful attention to the foods we're popping into our children's mouths and making some important alterations in their diets, we can become take-action parents on the front lines of defense against future illness. I look at this as disease intervention.

Training our children to become conscious of their food choices is part of that intervention. I would venture to say that teaching our children sound eating guidelines is equally as important as teaching them about Mesopotamia. Doesn't it seem logical that both history and nutrition are crucial to a complete education?

Our children begin to develop food preferences in early infancy that will remain with them throughout their lives. When we as parents begin to understand this on a gut level, we'll want to maximize their odds by helping them to develop a friendly, positive relationship with healthy foods.

Quite frankly, when I first heard about the direct link between childhood nutrition and adult disease, I was flabbergasted. I began to read as many reports as I could about this important link and found that the implications were staggering. Here are two samples from the U.S. government:

• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that unhealthy eating and inactivity cause 310,000 to 580,000 deaths every year — similar to the number of deaths caused by tobacco; thirteen times more than are caused by guns; and twenty times more than by drug use!

• The U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health tells us that two-thirds of all deaths are related to what we eat. This includes deaths from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, osteoporosis, and cancer. The report highlights that many of the diet-associated chronic diseases of adulthood begin in childhood.

While we should all find these reports alarming, I think it's important that we also view them as motivating. And this is where we, as parents, come in. To understand the necessity of early intervention, let's take a look at how childhood nutrition links to obesity, the development of heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis.

Obesity — Much More Than Just a Weight Problem

We only have to watch kids in school yards (no matter how oversize their pants!), or listen to the nightly news to understand how prevalent obesity has become in our society. Yet, while we're aware of this growing epidemic, much of our focus has been on thinness. Children can be cruel, and none of us want our sons and daughters to be ridiculed because they're fat. But our preoccupation with looking good misses the more serious issue: the link between childhood obesity and chronic adult disease.

We now know that obesity is a definite risk factor for a number of diseases, including heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, Type II diabetes, gallbladder disease, and for complications from any type of surgery. Recent studies from researchers highlight the enormity and the seriousness of the obesity epidemic:

• The Centers for Disease Control tells us that obesity is becoming a national health problem with nearly 15 percent — almost nine million children — now categorized as seriously overweight, and that number is rising. Instead of seeing heart disease occur when our children reach their fifties and sixties, researchers are predicting that our sons and daughters might be subject to heart disease as early as their twenties and thirties.

• A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed a direct relationship between excess weight and the risk of death from most cancers — the more body fat our children carry, the greater their risk.

• Researchers from Duke University report that a staggering number of obese children are developing Type II diabetes earlier in their lives, in some cases, during their teenage years.

What can we do about these findings? We need to prevent our children from becoming obese — that means ensuring that they eat nutritious foods and exercise regularly. If they have already started down the path to obesity we need to intervene immediately. If we can prevent a child from becoming an obese adult, we will be making a substantial difference in their lives.

Obesity is a vitally important issue, so let's be clear. Many confuse obesity with a few stubborn pounds — but it's not those extra five pounds everyone wants to lose. According to the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, individuals are considered obese when their weight is 20 percent or more over the maximum desirable for their height. Obesity is also defined as a BMI (body mass index) over 30. Adults with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 are considered overweight, but not obese. In children, obesity is also defined as a BMI equal to or greater than the 95th percentile on the BMI graph. (To learn how to calculate BMI, turn to The Tools, page 157.)

Copyright © 2004 by Joan Lunden and Myron Winick, MD

About the Author

Joan Lunden was co-host of ABC's Good Morning America for nearly twenty years. A bestselling author, she hosts A&E's Behind Closed Doors and the Newborn Channel's Parenting Minutes. She lives in Connecticut.

Is the Williams Professor of Nutrition and Pediatrics (emeritus) at Columbia University and for more than fifteen years serves as Director of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia's Collage of Physicians and Surgeons. Chairman of the Task Force for the Study of Pediatric Antecedents of Adult Diseases of the Institute for Cancer Prevention (formerly the American Health Foundation), Dr. Winick lives in New York City.