Bird in a Blender posted:

This seems so odd because getting regular exercise usually improves educational outcomes, so depriving kids of exercise is just going to hinder academic performance.

Jaxyon posted:

My brother in christ, why would you imagine that people care about actual outcomes instead of the appearance of caring about outcomes?

Our entire country is built on ignoring things that have been proven to be effective.

Bird in a Blender posted:

This seems so odd because getting regular exercise usually improves educational outcomes, so depriving kids of exercise is just going to hinder academic performance. As a kid who was very overweight at 12, and then got down to a healthy weight in high school, telling parents their kid should have surgery seems kind of crazy to me. The article does say this is for kids in the 95th percentile of BMI, and I don't remember what I would've been at that age. Just seems like there are other approaches we need to take to address obesity that don't revolve around drugs and surgery. Those solutions are societal though.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Here is something that will probably be controversial.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is now recommending that kids with weight problems be considered for new anti-obesity drugs as early as age 12 and bariatric surgery as early as age 13.

Their study found that the eating habits of children rarely change once they become an adult and that early and aggressive anti-obesity treatment is the most effective method.

According to the AAP, diet and exercise alone won't work for a small portion of people and a larger portion of people just can't/won't make the lifestyle adjustments required as an adult. That means that breaking the habits through drug or surgical intervention as a youth is the most effective technique.

Some doctors, as mentioned in the article, are against this and worry it will shift people even further away from making lifestyle changes to reduce obesity. Additionally, they worry about the long-term impact of being dependent on surgery or drugs to maintain a healthy weight and that there isn't really a universal standard for determining who might need them versus who might be fine with other less serious interventions.

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1612460456647573504

quote:

The group's guidance takes into consideration that obesity is a biological problem and that the condition is a complex, chronic disease, said Aaron Kelly, co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota.

"Obesity is not a lifestyle problem. It is not a lifestyle disease," he said. "It predominately emerges from biological factors."

Mooseontheloose posted:

I mean doctors are only looking at one slice of the pie here (er...so to speak), they are looking at the medical side so ok fine this is what they are recommending medically. The fact is our farm subsidies and lifestyle and lack of willingness to provide free healthy food at schools is going unaddressed. This is before we talk about how outmoded the school day is and we should probably allow for more outdoor physical activities for kids.

Mooseontheloose posted:

I thought it was if you were somewhat overweight it's fine but obesity comes with its own issues. I know BMI is being somewhat phased out too cause its just tries to put everyone in one box.

I mean doctors are only looking at one slice of the pie here (er...so to speak), they are looking at the medical side so ok fine this is what they are recommending medically. The fact is our farm subsidies and lifestyle and lack of willingness to provide free healthy food at schools is going unaddressed. This is before we talk about how outmoded the school day is and we should probably allow for more outdoor physical activities for kids.

Twincityhacker posted:

...wasn't there just a study published that said that being "fat" produced no worse outcomes compared to being "skinny" after controlling for delayed diagnosis by doctors because the doctors told the paicents that their complaint was *because* they were fat and not cancer or whatever it ended up being.

haveblue posted:

What is the exact cutoff they're working with for the 95th percentile of 13-year-old weight? Because I'm guessing it's a bit beyond a few too many cheeseburgers

haveblue posted:

What is the exact cutoff they're working with for the 95th percentile of 13-year-old weight? Because I'm guessing it's a bit beyond a few too many cheeseburgers

Discendo Vox posted:

The guidelines have a really extensive policy section discussing causal sources. Please read them, or at least the executive summary, before you make things up about them.

Mooseontheloose posted:

They talk about HOW we got here it, it doesn't really give any recommendations to fixing the non-medical part of it. Is that better?

Main Paineframe posted:

I thought the opioid epidemic was a consequence of pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to heavily overprescribe highly addictive drugs with insufficient caution or controls, driving many patients to become addicted and continue to seek the drugs afterward.

Portraying it as "people desperate to anesthetize themselves against the intolerable conditions of poverty" is, I think, incredibly uncharitable at best. It looks sympathetic at first glance, but it's really just a slight reframing of War On Drugs narratives on addiction: it's based on the idea that drug addiction is simply a result of poor people lacking willpower and driving themselves to death to escape their unhappiness, rather than a physical dependence. Though of course, those kinds of narratives long predate the War On Drugs - it's long been convenient for the elites selling the drugs to suggest that addiction is just poor people becoming obsessed.

HookedOnChthonics posted:

lol, uncharitable compared to your portrayal of a bunch of dummies that got bamboozled into throwing their lives away by any schmuck with a white coat and fancy degree?

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Here is something that will probably be controversial.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is now recommending that kids with weight problems be considered for new anti-obesity drugs as early as age 12 and bariatric surgery as early as age 13.

Their study found that the eating habits of children rarely change once they become an adult and that early and aggressive anti-obesity treatment is the most effective method.

According to the AAP, diet and exercise alone won't work for a small portion of people and a larger portion of people just can't/won't make the lifestyle adjustments required as an adult. That means that breaking the habits through drug or surgical intervention as a youth is the most effective technique.

Some doctors, as mentioned in the article, are against this and worry it will shift people even further away from making lifestyle changes to reduce obesity. Additionally, they worry about the long-term impact of being dependent on surgery or drugs to maintain a healthy weight and that there isn't really a universal standard for determining who might need them versus who might be fine with other less serious interventions.

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1612460456647573504

Discendo Vox posted:

Individual educational experiences from the US are unlikely to be informative to broader elements, as one of the defining elements of US education is that there's little to no direct federal oversight and education systems vary massively by state, county, municipality, and individual school.

Main Paineframe posted:

I don't think your summary really lines up with the article. You summarized it as "people just can't/won't make the lifestyle adjustments required", but the article appears to go a lot further than that: it entirely rejects the idea of lifestyle factors influencing weight at all! It compares obesity to asthma, treating it as a condition that some people are just born with and can't ever escape without medical treatment.

Incidentally, the article also doesn't mention the word "parent" or "parents" at all. I wonder if that's related. Because when it comes to lifestyle diseases among 12-year-olds, there's a lot about their lifestyle that they don't get to pick. They're not choosing their own meals, for the most part - that's up to the adults around them.

quote:

One expert in pediatric obesity cautioned that while kids with obesity must be treated early and intensively, he worries that some doctors may turn too quickly to drugs or surgery.

"It's not that I'm against the medications," said Dr. Robert Lustig, a longtime specialist in pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. "I'm against the willy-nilly use of those medications without addressing the cause of the problem."

Lustig said children must be evaluated individually to understand all of the factors that contribute to obesity. He has long blamed too much sugar for the rise in obesity. He urges a sharp focus on diet, particularly ultraprocessed foods that are high in sugar and low in fiber.

FlamingLiberal posted:

It's incredibly irresponsible for this group to advocate for loving bariatric surgery for kids like that

All of the people I know who have had it done have had complications and/or just end up regaining the weight anyway

Gumball Gumption posted:

Really the problem seems to be unscrupulous food manufacturers being able to put addictive sugar in everything to toxic levels.

Gumball Gumption posted:

Really the problem seems to be unscrupulous food manufacturers being able to put addictive sugar in everything to toxic levels.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

To be fair, most people who get the surgery do lose the weight. It has a success rate between 68% and 74% long-term and about 85% short-term.

https://www.vidawellnessandbeauty.com/weight-loss-surgery/long-term-success-rate-of-gastric-bypass-surgery/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3470459/

I have no idea if there are major differences or other implications for getting in done as a child, though.

Discendo Vox posted:

Briefly on this topic, sugar isn't "addictive" and Lustig isn't a good source on jack poo poo

Dick Trauma posted:

mawarannahr posted:

Can you expand on this? Do you consider habit forming characteristics and binding to dopamine and opioid receptors, dopamine and acetylcholine release in the nucleus Accumbens and so on?

Judgy Fucker posted:

There's no time in the school day for recess, gotta cram in as much prep work as possible for the myriad array of standardized tests that've been implemented over the last quarter-century due to declining academic performance, which is obviously all teachers' fault and not at all the fault of a lack of investment in education and the breakdown of supportive family and community structures in society writ large. Gotta keep the teachers accountable and the wallets of the psychometrics industry full, so playtime is over, Johnnie and Janie, start hittin' the books!

mawarannahr posted:

Can you expand on this? Do you consider habit forming characteristics and binding to dopamine and opioid receptors, dopamine and acetylcholine release in the nucleus Accumbens and so on?

Gumball Gumption posted:

It doesn't fit the medical definition of addiction since it's not something we develop a tolerance of and don't withdraw from. I do think it's "addictive" in a colloquial sense and we allow it to be put in food at knowingly dangerous and toxic amounts.

The real problem to me is that addiction is a term for intoxicants and sugar isn't an intoxicant. It's a food which we're going to seek out since naturally we would find it in relatively small amounts and now we can have all we want. It's not addictive because it's not really aberrant human behavior to want sugar. It is just a different dangerous thing.

Charliegrs posted:

Classified documents from Biden’s time as VP discovered in private office, source says

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/politics/joe-biden-classified-documents-upenn/index.html

You gotta be kidding me. And apparently some of them were classified as SCI which means sensitive compartmented information which I believe is the highest classification. God Trumpworld is going to have a field day with this.

Discendo Vox posted:

Nutrition science is a blasted-out hellscape in which there are multiple competing disingenuous interests on both sides of many issues and no single entity to blame. I've got some old effortposts I can pull together on problems in the area if it would benefit discussion.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

apperently biden and co returned them pretty quickly after discovery so lol. chuds are gonna be bad faith dipshits about it and it will go on the list of investigation like getting mad they can't look at hunters dick.

Google Jeb Bush posted:

Doj investigating is, you know, fine. But yeah it looks like Biden's lawyers etc did the right thing when made aware.

Gumball Gumption posted:

It doesn't fit the medical definition of addiction since it's not something we develop a tolerance of and don't withdraw from.

I do think it's "addictive" in a colloquial sense and we allow it to be put in food at knowingly dangerous and toxic amounts.

The real problem to me is that addiction is a term for intoxicants and sugar isn't an intoxicant. It's a food which we're going to seek out since naturally we would find it in relatively small amounts and now we can have all we want. It's not addictive because it's not really aberrant human behavior to want sugar. It is just a different dangerous thing.

quote:

n. a state of psychological or physical dependence (or both) on the use of alcohol or other drugs. The term is often used as an equivalent term for substance dependence and sometimes applied to behavioral disorders, such as sexual, Internet, and gambling addictions. A chemical substance with significant potential for producing dependence is called an addictive drug. —addictive adj.

quote:

So back to the question, is sugar addictive? The term addiction is generally reserved for drugs of abuse (ie, cocaine, heroin, morphine, nicotine and alcohol) and is many times used synonymously with dependence.17 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) defines ‘substance use disorder’ (ie, addiction) if at least two to three criteria (symptoms) exist from a list of 11. This was a change from DSM-IV, which categorised both substance abuse and substance dependence as separate disorders, and substance abuse only required one criterion. In DSM-5 these two catego- ries have been combined into ‘substance use disorder’. It is also interesting to note that binge eating disorder has been added to DSM-5.
Sweet and high-fat foods are preferred by those with binge eating disorders and that those preferences are mediated by the endogenous opioid system.
In animal models, sugar produces more symptoms (eg, cravings, bingeing, tolerance and withdrawal) than is required to be considered an addictive substance. So we can be quite confident that sugar is indeed addictive in animal models. In fact, animal data demonstrate significant overlap between the consumption of added sugars and drug-like effects, producing (1) bingeing, (2) craving (a strong desire to ‘use’), (3) tolerance (gradual escalation in intake with repeated use), (4) withdrawal (adverse physiological signs with discontinuation of use), (5) cross-sensitisation (increased response to drugs of abuse), (6) cross-tolerance (animals become tolerant to the analgesic effects of morphine after chronic intake of sugar and saccharin), (7) cross-dependence (suppression of withdrawal symptoms with certain drugs),(8) reward (intense dopamine release in the brain), and (9) opioid effects, such as the release of endogenous opioids on consuming sweet substances, symptoms of narcotic withdrawal when an opiate blocker is given, and other neurochemical changes in the brain.

A person may become addicted to sugar due to dependence on his or her own endogenously released opioids.This is particularly revealing when looking at patients with anorexia who may be ‘addicted to starvation’ by the same dependence pathway that occurs when eating sugar (ie, addiction to endogenously released opioids that occurs during starvation). If anorexia can be classified as a disease, and is apparently the body’s addiction to its own endogenously released opioids, then sugar addiction (dependence to endogenously released opioids on consumption of sweets) should also be able to fall under the classification of a disease.

quote:

Finally, there is strong evidence of the existence of sugar addiction, both at preclinical and clinical level. Our model has demonstrated that five out of eleven criteria for SUD are met, specifically: use of larger amounts and for longer than intended, craving, hazardous use, tolerance, and withdrawal. From an evolutionary perspective, we must consider addiction as a normal trait that permitted humans to survive primitive conditions when food was scarce. As we evolved culturally, the neural circuits involved in addictive behaviors became dysfunctional and instead of helping us survive they are in fact compromising our health. From a revolutionary perspective, understanding the molecular, and neurological/psychological intricacies of addiction (sugar, drugs of abuse) will permit the discovery of new therapies (pharmacological and non-pharmacological) and possible management of at least one crucial factor in the occurrence of obesity.

quote:

The experimental question is whether or not sugar can be a substance of abuse and lead to a natural form of addiction. “Food addiction” seems plausible because brain pathways that evolved to respond to natural rewards are also activated by addictive drugs. Sugar is noteworthy as a substance that releases opioids and dopamine and thus might be expected to have addictive potential. This review summarizes evidence of sugar dependence in an animal model. Four components of addiction are analyzed. “Bingeing”, “withdrawal”, “craving” and cross-sensitization are each given operational definitions and demonstrated behaviorally with sugar bingeing as the reinforcer. These behaviors are then related to neurochemical changes in the brain that also occur with addictive drugs. Neural adaptations include changes in dopamine and opioid receptor binding, enkephalin mRNA expression and dopamine and acetylcholine release in the nucleus accumbens. The evidence supports the hypothesis that under certain circumstances rats can become sugar dependent. This may translate to some human conditions as suggested by the literature on eating disorders and obesity.

Discendo Vox posted:

"Habit forming characteristics" and triggering a dopamine response describes everything pleasurable. It's not a basis to claim that sugar is addictive. This is part of the line of reasoning promoted by Lustig, who is, again, a really infamous figure in nutrition science, the kinda guy who empties the room at conferences when he speaks.