perfectly thin and have awful risk factors

With a huge amount of attention being focused on overweight and obese children in America and the United Kingdom a perception is forming that if your children are thin they are therefore perfectly healthy. Well, that is not necessarily the case according to a group of scientists at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Miami, Florida.

Over the last nine years the Pritikin Family Program has been checking on the health of children by looking at their hearts and not purely focusing on their waistlines. The kids get a full checkup for all of the important risk factors for heart disease including LDL bad cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose levels and blood pressure levels.

The results showed that the outward appearance of unhealthy eating in the form of being overweight was not necessarily an indicator of internal health and that many of the slim children had arteries that were beginning to clog up with cholesterol-laden plaque.

In a research paper that was presented to the American College of Sports Medicine Conference the risk factors for 33 boys and girls who took part in the Pritikin Family Program were compared. The researchers made a point of comparing the slim children with the obese children and said that the results were not that significantly different. They said that both groups of children had worryingly high risk factors for heart disease and that in their small study the thin children even had higher average levels of LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol, and triglycerides than the obese children.

Because the children were young the Pritikin Family Program sorted them out pretty quickly and within two weeks all of the heart disease risk factors were dealt with in both groups of children. Nevertheless this research is extremely important because it shows that almost or all American children are eating unhealthily and that just because some of them don't appear to be obese does not mean that they are not in danger from future health problems connected to poor diet. 

Professor Robert Vogel from the University of Maryland said that this study shows that it is possible for a child to be "perfectly thin and have awful risk factors." Children need to be fed a healthy diet no matter how slim they appear to be. Junk food, high calorie fizzy drinks and unhealthy snacks should be taken in moderation. Fruit, vegetables and a balanced mix of different foodstuffs is essential for long term heart health.