You're listening to Well Now, Sates Podcast on Health and Wellness. I'm Kavita Patel and I'm

Maya Feller. We live in a weight obsessed world and children are not. In fact, they're held to the same moral hierarchy as adults when it comes to weight and body size and composition.

So I'll use my daughter as an example. to weight and body size and composition.

So I'll use my daughter as an example.

Until the age of seven, she consistently

plotted along the lower end of the growth chart,

around the 13th percentile. People who didn't know us would always comment on how cute and small she was and what a pretty girl she was and with a great metabolism she had.

Someone even went so far as to say, wow, she must be able to eat everything. Now, mind you, all of this is unsolicited

comments from strangers. Society decided that she had a desirable body and found it

socially acceptable to praise her for something that was completely outside of her

control. Meanwhile, she was totally self-conscious about her small size.

Kavita, I know that you primarily work with adults. What's been your experience with the

pediatric population regarding body weight composition and health?

Yeah, you're right Maya. I only work with adults, but now more than ever I am inheriting adults who have already had a pretty

significant metabolic workup prior to being officially an adult meaning prior to

the age of 18 they are starting to get cholesterol, they're

tracking their diabetes or pre-diabetes metrics, monitoring their sugars.

These are not type 1 diabetics.

We're struggling to kind of give people a label of type 2 diabetes even though they might qualify just because it does unfortunately from the moment a 12 year old might be diagnosed with that put them into a very different framework but it is one that we're seeing more and more and in fact we know now from clinical evidence that a majority of children above a certain weight probably have evidence of plaque in their arteries something that we've never seen before if we rewound the clock 50 years would have been unheard of. So in general, whether or not we would like to say that

there is not a problem, there is a very big problem and it's not just obesity. We're also seeing I think what some people might

call kind of skinny fat so those who might not necessarily have to your point a

certain body weight or certain composition by size or abdominal obesity, but they absolutely have, again, some of those

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