Two sobering stories released about adolescents and cardiovascular risk. The first catalogues the distressing degree of cardiovascular disease present in today's teens, with 2-3 or more cardiovascular risk factors present in the overweight and obese teens. The second study took an actual look at the cardiac function of some overweight teens and found on cardiac echo both altered anatomy and compromised function in the obese subjects.
Presumably this has been an true correlation whenever teens have been obese, but ever more alarming now in our current epidemic of obesity, predisposing young people to diabetes - more difficult to treat in the young, and cardiovascular disease, threatening morbidity and mortality at an early age.
Fingers can well be pointed at fast food restaurants and the lack of exercise but the true culprit is the faulty dietary advice of the last 30 years that has altered the way humans eat to a completely new paradigm of processed foods, reduced fat and increased sugars. People can take the stairs instead of the elevator till their shoes are worn out, but the world will not change until science and medicine accept that the dominant paradigm has been gravely misleading. And I do mean “gravely”.
