8-year-old sheds pounds, diabetes worries

Parents play important role in reversing troubling trends

By JEAN TARBETT - The Herald-Dispatch

FORT GAY -- It’s taco day at Fort Gay Elementary School. While many of the children sit down with a tray of nachos and beef, chocolate milk and an orange, Alex McGuire opens his Spider Man lunchbox and pulls out beef jerky, a piece of low-carb bread folded over some peanut butter and some cheese curls.

A glance down the long cafeteria table gives view of what the other packers brought -- sandwiches and chips. There’s a row of soda cans -- Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper and Pepsi. McGuire is drinking Propel, a flavored water with 4 grams of sugar.
The 8-year-old reaches across the table and picks up friend Baylie Cyrus’ honey bun.

"Forty-seven grams of carbs," he says and sets it back down. "That’s all I could eat all day."

At the advice of endocrinologist James Bailes, McGuire has been put on a low-carbohydrate diet. At first, he was limited to 25 grams of carbohydrates per day. Now, he’s up to 50 grams a day and has lost more than 30 pounds since August.

It’s an effective solution to what could have been a lifetime of diabetes. His mother said Bailes kindly and carefully explained to her oldest son -- she also has 7-year-old Riley -- that he had a choice of changing his diet or continuing as is, but giving himself insulin injections on a regular basis.

He chose the former and has become a success story that, according to statistics, needs to be emulated.

The American Diabetes Association says one in three of the children born in 2000 will develop diabetes in his or her lifetime if rates continue to increase as they are now.

"But that’s all preventable," Bailes said. "We’ve seen such a dramatic increase in the last 10 or 15 years with diabetes. That will continue at an alarming rate unless we do something about it."


The increase brings with it the high cost of health care because the younger you are when you get diabetes, the higher the cost to society, he said, because, "The younger you are when you get it, the more likely you are to get complications at a younger age."

The problem is a compilation of many lifestyle changes in recent decades. Decreases in physical activity can be attributed to at least two things. One is the decrease in physical activities in schools as teachers need more time to focus on meeting state and national academic standards.

At the same time, there’s been the shift in interest among children from playing outdoors to staying inside with the television, PlayStation and computer.

The sedentary lifestyle has been coupled with dietary changes as well. The easy, more affordable foods are the less nutritious ones, parents will tell you.

McGuire’s mother, Madea McGuire, is the first to admit it. The single mother of two runs her own hair salon and is in nursing school at St. Mary’s in Huntington, nearly an hour from their home in Fort Gay.

"It’s easy to go to McDonald’s after football practice," she said. "It’s easy, when you’re tired, to come home and fix something that’s unhealthy. It’s easy to give your kid a brownie instead of strawberries with Splenda."

What’s difficult is explaining to an 8-year-old boy why his brother can eat Frosted Flakes for breakfast, and premium Moose Tracks ice cream, but he can’t.

But considering, Alex has done well, she said. His third-grade teacher, Lara Queen, agreed.

"He’s very, very particular," she said. "If we have a snack, he wants me to check the carbs for him. He can have high-protein things, like peanut butter. And he always has a good lunch with vegetables, meat and water or some sort of diet drink. Sometimes yogurt."

When she gives the rest of her students juice, she gives McGuire water.

"It’s hard to give someone a Slim Jim when the rest of the kids get snack cakes, but he doesn’t complain a bit," Queen said. "He’s blown me away. Most of the time, kids know they shouldn’t eat something, but if you offer it to them, they’ll take it. He won’t."

Junk is definitely the food of choice for most students, she said.

Janice Christian, the head cook at the school, will back that up. Law requires the school to offer meat, two vegetables, bread, fruit and milk. On taco day, kids got nachos (in place of a hard-to-handle taco shell), beef, a cup filled with toppings such as lettuce and tomato, an orange and milk.

The children tended to eat the tacos and the meat, but the little Styrofoam cup with the vegetable toppings usually went into the trash can, as did the oranges. A line of kids formed to empty their trays before heading out to recess. Orange after orange after orange went straight into the garbage.

"If it’s healthy food, they don’t like it," Christian said. "They will eat fries, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, pizza and tacos."

And surprisingly, they’ll eat cutup veggies with ranch dip on occasion, she said. But they won’t eat peas or mixed vegetables.

"We have salads, and maybe one-third of the kids will eat it," she said.

That growing distaste for healthy foods and the sitting around are both significantly contributing to an obesity outbreak, Bailes said. But the diet may be a bigger factor.

There’s no question kids are much less active than they used to be, he said. But he sees a lot of active kids with weight problems.

"About 20 percent of parents say their kids are active but are still gaining weight, and I think that’s partly genetic and partly diet," he said.

Bailes has seen between 200 and 300 successful cases of kids on low-carb diets. There’s about a 50-percent success rate, he said, and success usually has to do with how well the child was able to follow through with the diet.

"Almost all who stay on it are successful in losing weight," Bailes said. "It’s a lot easier now to stay on a low-carb diet. The low-fat diet could be successful, but kids are hungry all the time and they’re not as successful."

The key for successful low-carbing is to have an effective maintenance program, he added. A maintenance plan usually allows kids to eat 75 to 100 carbs per day, and they should replace processed sugary carbs with fruits, vegetables and high-fiber foods, Bailes said.

A family effort

No child is going to do this alone.

Parents have "a huge role in their child’s health," Bailes said. "They’re the gatekeeper of the food. It’s not something kids can do on their own.

"Most of the kids who haven’t been successful is because the parent hasn’t followed through with the plan."

When health became an issue for McGuire, his mother isn’t sure. He was born big -- 10 pounds, 10 ounces -- and for the longest time, he was just big for his age.

Then all of a sudden, he was too big, and at risk of developing juvenile diabetes. They started the diet as prevention.

At that point, Madea McGuire started looking around and noticed that other kids were big, too -- active kids who played sports, just as Alex does. Three parents have asked for his pediatrician’s name.

"Parents are like, ‘How do you get your kid to do that,’ " Madea McGuire said.

To make it work, they focus on the fact that it’s for his health. Just like Bailes explained to them in the doctor’s office: "It’s not about going from fat to skinny. It’s about going from unhealthy to healthy."

A very important secret is to have healthy foods on-hand that he can just grab and eat. He’s not going to chop up vegetables and grill chicken himself.

He has his own cupboard filled with the basics: Slim Jims, peanuts, pork rinds. There are soy potato crisps, but he wasn’t big on them, she said. He does really like Triscuit Thin Crisps, which are relatively low on carbs. And "We live on peanut butter," she said.

But the fridge really tells the story, Madea McGuire says as she swings open the door to a sea of low- or no-carb foods, including salmon, turkey, ham, cheese, miniature peeled carrots packaged with ranch dip, low-carb juices and diet sodas.

Madea McGuire pulls out a receipt from Food City in Louis, Ky.: Cheese, low-carb yogurt, tuna, carrots, strawberries, frozen vegetables, hazelnuts, diet soda, bottled water -- the low-carb list goes on.

Alex eats sugar-free Jell-O with calorie-free whipped topping. Sometimes, they spread creamed cheese on a slice of ham and just roll it up to eat for lunch.

Madea McGuire has a giant, glass canister filled with Splenda, and her lazy susan is filled with soy flour, Vital wheat gluten with Vitamin C, no-calorie liquid sweetener, and Sweet N Low brown sugar substitute.

Most definitely, "It’s a lifestyle change," Madea McGuire said. Her other son still eats some everyday treats, but dinners are healthier now. Turkey, vegetables and the like.

"We go through chicken breasts now like you wouldn’t believe," Madea McGuire said. She’s made a concerted effort to make sure that although her son is steering away from carbs, he’s not eating too much fat either.

"With the low-carb, you have to be careful because a lot of things are high in fat," she said. "I take care of what Alex needs vitamin-wise."

Bailes says it’s not necessary to worry too much about fat, as long as you’re eating more protein instead of carbs.

"They can have more fat and not worry about it," he said. "Studies show that cholesterol gets better, good cholesterol goes up, bad cholesterol goes down and triglicerides decrease the most on a high-protein, low-carb diet. There’s never been a study that shows overall, a lipid profile does not improve."

Alex’s big treat: Carb Options chocolate ice cream, but that’s only an option on days when he’s really watched his carbs otherwise. Once, he even got a Reeses cup. He remembers that day well.

But he hasn’t cheated much. One day, a parent brought in off-limits snacks for the class, and Alex couldn’t partake. Queen didn’t have anything else on-hand to offer him, and asked if he’d like to get something out of the snack machine.

No, he told her. She was impressed.

The babysitter was, too, Madea McGuire said.

"She said, ‘He is amazing. He knows what carbs are, he knows what sodium is and fat is," Madea McGuire said.

Is it difficult for him? Sometimes, he said. He’s really sick of eggs. And "You can’t eat lots of regular bread. That’s what I miss the most," he said.

But he likes the results.

Especially during football games. He played linebacker and end for his Lawrence County (Ky.)Youth Football League team, the Bulldogs. The team won the Turf Bowl at Morehead State University this past season.

"I can run faster now -- that’s one thing I’ve noticed," he said. "I used to be the slowest kid in my class."

Not anymore, said Cyrus, his classmate across the lunch table.

"He’s the fastest in the class," she said.

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/2004.../19/LNspotb.htm

Thank you so much for posting this!

My sister's 2nd child was born at over 10 lbs (my sister is only 5'3"!!) and Sis suffered from gestational diabetes during her pregnancy. This puts her at a very huge risk for diabetes (my dad is diabetic, etoo) and so it's very much an issue for our family. I just passed this article along to both my sister and my parents' email addys.

Great article, beans!

I kid you not, I almost cried when I read that article. That young man is very inspiring.

We give our kids a version of low carb, and it has definitely helped them with their belly fat situation. And we kick them out to play outdoors whether they like it or not. Its odd that a kid considers going outside, to be a punishment. But they sometimes do. What helps is to go out with them and do something fun WITH them. A walk, riding bikes, hide and seek. The benefits of this are multiple for both child and parent.

How wonderful to read such a success story, my daughter has been on low carb since she was 10 (13 now), but have had so many problems with her stealing food, and also with non-believing grandparents.