It’s everyone’s problem. How can you help?
Childhood Obesity is everyone’s problem! I am passionately dedicated to helping the dental and medical professions work together in this fight to save lives. You may wonder how childhood obesity intersects with dentistry. I hardly know where to start. It saddens me to see this condition daily
First, tooth decay. Did you know that the biggest food-culprit in the upwardly trending weight crisis is the very same ingredient boosting dental disease? You guessed it—high fructose corn syrup. Americans are consuming an average of 63 pounds per person, per year of the stuff, primarily in juice, sports drinks and soda. The new culprit is the hot fries, which is worse than the sugar.
Childhood obesity stimulates a variety of other lifestyle illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, acid reflux, depression and osteoporosis, to name a few. Without the time, tools or courage to affront obesity, physicians are called to medicate these diseases, and 400+ of these lifestyle illness meds stimulate dry mouth as a side effect. Saliva shut down drives up tooth decay with a vengeance!
If watching kids get sicker during my time as a dentist has not been enough to keep me awake at night, the worry about our health care cost projections is. Right now 17 percent or more of our kids are obese and it is projected that 85 percent of these kids will be morbidly obese (100 pounds overweight) by age 30. If we think we are in a health care cost crisis now, just wait!
So, I’m just a dentist. Unfortunately, I am too small ALONE to stand up to the corn lobbyists, the FDA, the tobacco growers or their lobbyists. But with my time and concern, I can impact the health of my people, one child at a time. And so can you!
One more plea: Help me in the plight to get our health care and education teams on board. If you know someone working in medicine, dentistry, or education that interfaces with children, encourage them to get involved. A recent cover story in the Journal of the American Dental Association says 50% of dentists want to address obesity in patient care but only 1.6% does anything towards it. Why? Primarily there is a sense of inadequacy; lack of training/expertise and lack of appropriate tools. Please encourage your influential friends to learn more, and to get involved as if their own future depends on it. Let’s give our children all we have!
Call me at 314-322-4719 if you have any ideas about working together.
Sincerely,
Perdita Jay Fisher, DMD