To the Editor:
Re “Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever” (Week in Review, Aug. 30):
Your article about children’s diet and weight properly points out the difficulty of figuring out what children should eat, and getting them to eat it.
Recent research that has focused on body composition rather than on weight shows that while an excessive amount of fat tissue is harmful to health and well-being, a large amount of lean tissue is beneficial.
Leaner (but not necessarily lighter) youths engage in relatively large amounts of vigorous physical activity and ingest more calories than their less vigorously active peers.
At first, the idea that leaner kids eat more than fatter kids is counterintuitive. But when the role of physical activity is considered, it makes sense. High-intensity activities stimulate the body to direct the ingested nutrients to muscle and bone rather than to fat. Because lean tissue has a higher metabolic rate than fat, the leaner youth is able to ingest relatively large amounts of energy and the accompanying nutrients needed for healthy growth.
This concept helps explain why clinical trials that have focused on restriction of energy intake have been largely unsuccessful in preventing excessive accretion of fat, while trials that have emphasized vigorous physical activity, without emphasis on restriction of energy intake, have been more successful.
Our public health efforts to prevent child obesity and associated health problems will be more successful if they provide environments that encourage vigorous activity rather than continuing to pursue biologically counterproductive efforts to restrict how much children eat.
Bernard Gutin
Raleigh, N.C., Aug. 30, 2009
The writer is an adjunct professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and emeritus professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia.
Note from KBJ: It's a sad commentary on our society that a letter like this needs to be written.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 