Question, Question, Question

There have been many stories about how the 'epdimic' of obesity in children was leading to an 'epidemic' of Type II Diabetes.

But here you can see that there is no reliable evidence that the 'increase' has been anything more than a change in the diagnostic threshold and the increased use of testing.

"Is the overall incidence of diabetes rising? It is difficult to say. This is because the standards for diagnosing diabetes have changed radically over the last 30 years. We have gone from measuring glucose in the urine to carrying out an elaborate procedure known as the oral glucose tolerance test and finally to relying solely on fasting blood glucose. The level defining diabetes was dropped from 140 to 126 mg/dL in the 1990s. Loosening the diagnostic standards greatly increased the number of people classified as diabetic. Also, screening for diabetes has been stepped up, and now most people over age 45 are supposed to be checked every 3 years. In contrast, the average fasting blood glucose level in the adult population is about 85 mg/dL, and this value has not changed in decades. If there truly were an epidemic of diabetes, the average blood glucose level would rise, just as the average body weight has risen."

So it pays to question the use of the scaremongering stats that we are killing our kids with food. Question, Question, Question.

Also you may be familiar with this:

In 2002, Dr. William Klish of Texas Children's Hospital told the Houston Chronicle: "If we don't get this epidemic [of childhood obesity] in check, for the first time in a century children will be looking forward to a shorter life expectancy than their parents." Since then, Klish's statement has entered the lexicon of obesity scaremongers, making its way into countless articles, editorials, and even Congressional testimony—all without so much as a shred of credible research to back it up. Klish himself told the Center for Consumer Freedom that while he is the source of this pessimistic prognostication, his claim does not come from "evidence-based research." Rather, he explained: "It's based on intuition."

So basically, he just made it up. But he's not alone:

On March 17, 2005, more than three years after Klish first suggested the theory, The New England Journal of Medicine released a deeply flawed but highly publicized study that appeared to justify Klish's assertion. It claimed that because of obesity, the "youth of today may, on average, live less healthy and possibly even shorter lives than their parents." But like Klish, Dr. S. Jay Olshansky and his co-authors admitted that their dire prediction relied on their "collective judgment" rather than empirical, scientific evidence.

But what about the truth?

In May 2005, Science magazine published an article on the controversy over obesity deaths following the publication of a paper by Dr. Katherine Flegal and co-authors that said the number of deaths from excess weight was just one-fifteenth what the CDC said it had been. In the article, Olshansky appeared to back off his conclusions about life expectancy. According to Science:

"Olshansky now says that in light of Flegal's recent paper on obesity deaths and a companion paper that she, Williamson, and other CDC scientists authored in the same issues of JAMA, his life expectancy forecasts might be inaccurate."

Even before the Flegal study, Olshansky had more than his share of critics. "The Olshansky piece is seriously flawed," explained Dr. James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. "His perspective is that of an advocate making a case rather than a scientist evaluating the body of conflicting evidence."

So again, we need to question, question, question everything and don't just believe the health nazis.