Obesity Stable Among South Dakota Kids

Governor Mike Rounds is holding legacy-pressers to take credit for increasing South Dakota jobs, GDP, and university enrollment. Does he also want to take credit for maintaining the percentage of heavy kids?

The South Dakota Department of Health reports lots of our kids are still fat. "For the 2009-2010 school year, 32.7% of students were either overweight (16.7%) or obese (16%)." We've seen a little slimming from last year, but the numbers have hardly budged from in academic year 2003–2004, when 15.8% of South Dakota kids were obese and another 16.1% overweight.

Now note if you read the DoH reports that they changed terminology in the AY 2006–2007 report. Before that, kids in the 85th to 94th percentile for body-mass index (BMI) were labeled "at risk of overweight," while kids at or above the 95th percentile were labeled "overweight." In '06&ndash'07, "overweight" became "obese" and "at risk" became "overweight."

Confusing, I know. Just drink less pop and ride more bike, would ya?

Early in the Rounds Administration, the Department of Health set a goal to "reduce the percent of school-age children and adolescents who are overweight or obese from 17% in 2003 to 15% by 2010.” With the wording change, that goal became "reduce the percent of school-age children and adolescents who are at or above the 95th percentile BMI for age (obese) from 17 percent in 2003 to 15 percent by 2010.” No such luck.

Interestingly, the number of underweight kids has increased, too. In AY 2003–04, 2.8% of students (27,245) were below the fifth percentile for body mass index. I can't find the 2009–10 report yet, but the 2008–09 report shows 3.9% of students (40,202) underweight.

I guess that's one more example of the middle class getting smaller.

Secondhand Smoke Kills 600,000 in One Year

In the debate over South Dakota's new smoking ban, I've occasionally run across some dedicated pro-tobacco trolls who throw out pre-fab arguments claiming there's no evidence that secondhand smoke causes significant health harms.

Does 600,000 deaths a year sound significant to you?

Last Friday, British medical journal The Lancet published a study that finds 600,000 people worldwide died from disease attributable to secondhand smoke. The findings:

Worldwide, 40% of children, 33% of male non-smokers, and 35% of female non-smokers were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004. This exposure was estimated to have caused 379 000 deaths from ischaemic heart disease, 165 000 from lower respiratory infections, 36 900 from asthma, and 21 400 from lung cancer. 603 000 deaths were attributable to second-hand smoke in 2004, which was about 1·0% of worldwide mortality. 47% of deaths from second-hand smoke occurred in women, 28% in children, and 26% in men. DALYs [disability-adjusted life-years) lost because of exposure to second-hand smoke amounted to 10·9 million, which was about 0·7% of total worldwide burden of diseases in DALYs in 2004. 61% of DALYs were in children. The largest disease burdens were from lower respiratory infections in children younger than 5 years (5 939 000), ischaemic heart disease in adults (2 836 000), and asthma in adults (1 246 000) and children (651 000).

[Öberg, M., Jaakkola, M. S., Woodward, A., Peruga, A., & Prüss-Ustün, A., "Worldwide burden of disease from exposure to second-hand smoke: a retrospective analysis of data from 192 countries, The Lancet, 2010.11.26]

That data is pretty plain. Indoor smoking killed more people in 2004 than did al-Qaeda. Cigarette smoke is a deadly indoor pollutant. We can drastically reduce if not eliminate these 600,000 deaths with simple, common-sense rules that say, "You can't emit that pollutant in a confined space." We can save those lives without big military spending, fancy technology, or humiliating and unconstitutional patdowns at the airport.

Secondhand smoke was responsible for 1 in 100 deaths worldwide in 2004. Add those deaths to the 5.1 million annual deaths from direct smoking, and you get a clear picture of tobacco as a serious threat to mankind's health and welfare.

South Dakota perspective: run a straight ratio of deaths to population from the Lancet study, and you get about 70 deaths a year in our fair state from secondhand smoke. There are still some idiot parents out there smoking in their cars and homes with their kids present, but our new smoking ban in bars and restaurants should save at least some of those unlucky 70 from an early tobacco-induced death.

Don Rose and the other bar owners who tried stopping the smoking ban argued that the ban was really about freedom. They're right: banning indoor smoking is about freedom, the first freedom listed by our Founding Fathers: life.

Moms Use Web to Share Breast Milk in South Dakota

The dairy industry probably frowns on this: a friend recently sent me a link to the South Dakota chapter of a relatively new organization, Eats on Feets. The group started just last summer in Arizona to facilitate the sharing of human breast milk. Eats on Feets does not collect or sell breast milk; they simply provide a forum where moms can make connections and arrange their own deals to share the best food for babies.

Eats for Feets also provides all sorts of information on a topic that makes some people unreasonably queasy. Today's fun facts:

1. If you bottle breast milk, don't shake it! If you do, you'll mess up the molecules. Really!
2. There is no documented case of HIV transmission from a single shot of breast milk. Chemicals in breast milk work with time and cold to destroy HIV in expressed breast milk. But if you're sharing breast milk, you should still ask suppliers about their health background.
   
3. Various studies find that if we humans behaved more like our primate relatives, we would wean our offspring from breast milk at age 5 or later.
   

The Eats for Feets SD page links to ladies offering milk in Vermillion, Sioux Falls, and the Black Hills. Remember, moms, that milk has good bacteria eager to colonize your babies' tummies and keep them healthy!

But be careful, ladies: the dairy industry hates competition.