There’s a problem with childhood obesity in this country, but Chris Pohlod, pediatrics assistant professor, thinks some unhealthy habits that evolve into serious health problems can be curbed ahead of time.
After speaking with professionals that work with overweight children, Pohlod and three MSU colleagues began developing an office-based instrument to help identify key strategies where proper childhood weight was achieved.
“It’s opposed to an open-interview format, where you wait for problems to come up. This gives us a sense of things to look for ahead of time,” Pohlod said. “Hopefully it will allow us to speed up the process of helping people lose weight.”
He’s been able to draw some conclusions from his work already, but because there are so many factors that could lead to obesity, determining cause is sometimes difficult.
He said both environmental and cultural factors play a part, including the rising cost of healthy foods.
“Prices of fruits and vegetables have gone up in the past 10 to 20 years, compared to boxed foods like macaroni and cheese,” he said.
Lack of physical activity, genetics and certain parenting styles are other common factors.
Although Pohlod said most of the information is well known in the health community, his role as a pediatrics physician will be informing and supporting parents who might not have access to good information.
“We’re trying to teach parents to respect a child’s own appetite,” he said. “We think that on a personal level we have a drive to breathe, as well as a drive to eat. If we can get away from the clean-your-plate mentality and allow a child to say, ‘I’m done,’ research says they take in far fewer calories than if you have a parent who’s very worried about how much their kids eat.”
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