Shanker – obesity

The next hub is obesity, so we know that this is a very serious problem now, 17% of our children are obese, 34% are significantly overweight, five-fold increase over 25 years. So we’ve tried lots of these campaigns with very little success, very little effectiveness now, where we’re going to educate these children on healthy eating or the need to exercise. The problem of obesity really doesn’t have anything to do with will-power, in fact, introducing the concept of will-power makes everything worse, and the reason is that when we look at the stressors on a child, when we look at the sorts of things that are draining the child’s nervous system, one of the biggest is negative emotion, negative emotion has a huge draining affect, and that’s things like anxiety, frustration, shame.  

So now, if you start telling the child, or unconsciously conveying the message to the child ‘you’re obese because you’re weak, you’re obese because you lack will-power to resist that extra donut’, whatever it is, now this child, on top of everything else that this poor kid is struggling with in life, we’ve now saddled this kid with strong negative emotion, which is going to further drain the system, so we’re doing the worst things we could.  

When we look at these kids we’re starting to see a fairly significant pattern, the research is still at a very early stage, but what we’re seeing is a recurring theme of poor sensory integration. And we’re seeing a lot of kids that have poor sensory integration, and it may have something to do with modern life, it may have something to do with, as we look at the drivers of strong self-integration, the biggest driver is play, the biggest driver is physical play, it’s under conditions of physical play where the child is driven by strong positive affect, the fun of playing, and play is the most energizing of anything we can do, it’s the opposite of a negative emotion, it fuels the system, under this strong affect-driven system, you know fun, curiosity, whatever it is, the child is constantly stretching his body, the child is constantly doing things that create this integration, that create; the brain responds to the challenges we place on it, but if I have a child now that’s spending an inordinate amount of time watching a video that’s supposedly going to make him bright, and not playing, not running around, not exploring, not discovering, on top of everything else what we’re doing is, we are, we are short circuiting, we’re blocking those necessary physical experiences which drive sensory integration in the early years of life.  

Now this poor kid is locked in a vicious circle because of the poor sensory integration, that child is going to avoid physical experiences as he starts to enter preschool or kindergarten. This is the kid now who is going to be drawn to things like the video game, and so now everything is starting to exacerbate, he’s avoiding those very experiences namely running around, playing, etc., which we know, of all the things we’ve studied, have the greatest effect on balancing the self-regulatory system.