2023-06-02 09:17:32
Obesity – in children and adults – has long struggled with the image of ‘own fault, big bump’. Pediatric endocrinologist Edgar van Mil is pleased that obesity is now regarded as a disease. Despite this, he still considers medication and/or a stomach reduction to be a last resort. “The most important thing is to learn a healthy lifestyle. Medication can help with that.”
It is no secret that Dutch children have become increasingly heavier on average in recent decades. Otherwise, watch a recording of the children’s program on YouTube for fun Can you tell me the way to Hamelin, sir? and marvel at the many ‘skinny’ children in the 1970s. The steady increase in the average body weight of children has various causes, says Edgar Van Mil. In addition to being a pediatric endocrinologist at the Jeroen Bosch Hospital, he is also a professor of Youth, Nutrition and Health at Maastricht University. “First of all, there is our evolutionary predilection for high-calorie foods. For thousands of years, eating a lot of fatty and sweet food when it was available was an important survival strategy. In our current society, this predilection works to our detriment. Because, cause two, we now live in an environment with an almost constant and abundant supply of high-calorie food.”
“Gaining knowledge and competences about a healthy lifestyle are more important than the number of kilos that will be lost within a year”
Pediatric endocrinologist Edgar van Mil
Predisposition and lifestyle
That nevertheless
#happy #medicalization #obesity