I'm gonna do it all at once and it's just gonna come out. It's like tower of battle. Like just everything. I am so grateful. I have to say that you are looking into this one because there's no question that we had to cover it. Yeah. And I think

I would emotionally just like turn into a fine dust. Because this makes me so sad and angry. That's what I'm gonna do to you over the course of the next three hours.

Oh no, no. No, we're not doing that. Do one. Do one. Do one. Hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase. The podcast that likes you just the way you are.

Oh, you did like a nice one. That's straight from the Mr. Rogers playbook. And I felt like we needed some niceness for the extreme grim goblin garbage that we're about to sort through today.

We love you just as you are unless you work for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Then we have some questions. We want you to be different.

We don't like what you're choosing to do right now. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. You can get merch at T public. You can also subscribe through Apple podcast, which is the same audio content as the Patreon content audio.

And Michael, I feel like I am like getting ready to be full of range. It's like a little propeller on your head that like I get to spin around when when we do these episodes. And I get to imagine.

And you're just gonna lift off out of your seat. Just getting ready for lift off.

But today we are talking about the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on the treatment of childhood obesity. They released the last set of guidelines in 2007. The general approach for those was watchful waiting.

If your kid is fat, they'll probably outgrow it. We don't need to do anything aggressive. This year in January, they updated the guidelines and recommended a much more aggressive approach.

The thing that got the most media coverage was the fact that they are now recommending weight loss drugs and bariatric surgery for kids as young as 12. And I went on to the AAP's website. I got the document. I pasted it into word. It was 136 pages.

I went through it. I checked the citations. I talked to someone from the AAP. And this episode is literally just going to be us going through the document.

I'm going to do my best to try to make that interesting, but I might fail.

So as usual, we need to start this episode with a carnival of housekeeping. First of all, this is going to include a lot of like, sugary eating disorder, weight loss, calorie stuff.

It's also going to include the word obesity a lot, which is not a word that either one of us like or use, but in the context of these studies, because they are exclusively based on BMI categories.

We kind of have to talk about those categories when we're talking about the studies.

And we do episodes sometimes where it's like, I look into an influencer and I tell you about it and you've never heard of them.

They're always from Australia. And that isn't fake like the show isn't scripted. We're coming in fresh to those episodes.

This is not one of those episodes. This is a topic that both of us have been thinking and writing about for a very long time.

And we're not going to pretend that we don't already have issues. And of course, like human biases that we are coming in with.

Yes. So the purpose of these guidelines is just to kind of get all of the evidence on this issue in one place.

So they've put together a task force. There's like a committee. All these doctors have spent years looking at every single thing that's ever been published.

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