The New York Times, Childhood Obesity and Critical Thinking

Looking past the Allan Gardens Greenhouse, 2023

Same view, 2013. 

I discovered podcasts back in the days when I was still working, but really cranked my consumption in 2020 when I was out on pandemic walks. I don't pace the neighbourhood for 90 minutes a day like I used to, but I still listen, a lot, to podcasts.

Among them is The Daily from the New York Times. I keep my critical faculties set to "max" when listening, because, well, it's the New York Times. 

Most of the time, though, the reporting is good, the topics interesting, and it's my only source for American political news that's not a late night comedy show. 

A couple of days ago, I listened with growing incredulity to an episode where Gina Kolata, a medical reporter for the NYT, asserted that new guidelines from the American Paediatric Association said the best solutions for overweight kids were drugs and surgery. For children as young as two years old. Other interventions, she said, just don't work.

Her cheese-cloth "reasoning" supporting this incredible conclusion is too much to get into here (you can find the episode here), but even a casual listener could detect the incoherence and false opposites she relied on to support the notion that, for example, a 12-year-old should have their internal organs mutilated so as to avoid being laughed at in gym class.

The interview bothered me so much I went back to the show website to see if I could get more information. There I found more than 80 comments, all of them negative. Some suggested that Kolata had the contents of the guidelines wrong. 

So, I read the guidelines. 

I'm not a medical expert but I sure wouldn't say, as did Kolata, that the APA guidelines point to drugs and surgery as best solutions to a complex problem influenced by genetics, location, socio-economic status, race, parental behaviours, activity levels, junk food and soft drink consumption, etc., etc., etc. Rather, they were offered as third- and fourth-resort approaches after less intrusive, shown-to-be-effective approaches had failed to achieve results.

What really surprised me in the guidelines was the information that children as young as two are already being medicated for obesity and children as young as twelve are already having gastric bands inserted into their still-growing bodies. 

Good grief.

Kolata has a long and distinguished career as a journalist specializing in science and medicine. It's hard to believe she decided all on her own, without some other incentive, to promote a distorted and misleading version of the emphasis of the new guidelines. I'm not going to speculate as to what that incentive might have been (though at least one comment invoked the spectre of Big Pharma).

I guess the good news is at least 87 people (88 if you count me), didn't buy it. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen