Obesity epidemic may have roots in 1950s
Published: December 19, 2020
After long days discussing America’s obesity problem, Melinda Sothern has had enough of windowless conference rooms.
“I need to exercise,” she says, pausing to review her plans in the San Diego Convention Center lobby. She plans to rent a bicycle in Coronado and ride, fast and far.
Sothern, 55, is a woman who practices what she preaches. And one of her messages about obesity is aimed at women like herself: mothers.
Fat mothers. Thin mothers. And especially mothers-to-be.
A leading fitness and nutrition expert at Louisiana State University, she has a theory that the tide of obesity that has swept the nation in the last two decades had its roots in what young mothers did, or didn’t do, in the postwar, suburban-sprouting 1950s.
If she’s right — and evidence is stacking up on her side — reproductive-age women may become the central focus of efforts to reverse America’s fat problem.
The obesity epidemic has multiple causes, Sothern acknowledges. Food has changed in the last five decades. Americans have become much more sedentary. But she thinks that obesity rates soared just when they did — in the 1980s — because a generation of young women decades earlier smoked, spurned breast-feeding and restricted their weight during numerous, closely spaced pregnancies.
“It was the evil ’50s. A perfect recipe for obesity,” she says.
Sothern calls her theory “the obesity trinity.” And she thinks the key to getting Americans to slim down lies in studying those lessons from the past. Among her prescriptions for change: Women who are significantly overweight should be discouraged from having babies until they shed some pounds.
A central part of Sothern’s theory — that obesity starts in the womb — is gaining currency with a growing number of doctors and researchers who say that reversing the epidemic, with its attendant cases of weight-related illnesses such as diabetes, should begin by addressing nutrition in pregnancy and early-life feeding practices.
“We don’t completely understand how people become obese, when people become obese and why children become obese,” says Michael L. Power, a senior research associate at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and a coauthor of the book “The Evolution of Obesity.”
“But children of parents in the ’50s and ’60s may have started this off.”
Sothern points to her own family as an example of the obesity trinity in action.
Her mother was told by the obstetrician in the 1950s to gain less than 20 pounds during pregnancy. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day was a good way to keep the weight down, the doctor said.
Breast-feeding was not in vogue, so Sothern and her two siblings were bottle-fed formula. The kids were born within a span of four years.
All three children — Sothern thinks it’s no coincidence — battled with their weight as adults: Her brother is diabetic and her sister is obese.
Sothern, at a healthy-looking 5 feet 3 and 129 pounds, has spent her adult life beating down a tendency to pack on weight by sticking to a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and fish and a regimen of dancing, biking, housework, gardening, sailing and strength training.
Her story, she says, is nothing unusual.
Women in the 1950s and 1960s — think Betty Draper on the hit TV show “Mad Men” — were generally advised to restrict weight gain in pregnancy to as little as 10 pounds. Inadequate nutrition in some of these women could easily have programmed their babies to catch up on growth during infancy — and studies suggest such growth spurts increase the risk of later obesity.
Women smoked with abandon, unaware of the health risks. Smoking during pregnancy is thought to contribute to obesity risk in offspring because nicotine disrupts mechanisms in the body that control appetite, metabolic rate and fat storage.
Article source: http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-obesity-causes-20111219,0,6170668.story
Leave a Reply