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To sell an expensive drug nobody would otherwise buy, you first have to create a market for the drug. To do so, you have to disqualify all of the things you could utilize instead of a drug to prop it up as the only solution.
I took a break from the “news” for five minutes yesterday and came home to the most absurd headline I have ever seen. I had to do a double-take. I could not believe the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — a group of 67,000 pediatricians that claims to be committed to the “optimal physical, mental, and social health and well-being” of children, adolescents, and young adults — was recommending aggressive treatment for early childhood obesity that doesn’t involve throwing out junk food or getting kids outdoors. No, they want to put kids under the knife and pump them full of drugs.
If I were a member of the AAP and didn’t cancel my membership card when it issued ridiculous “based on anything but science” guidance on COVID-19 vaccines, I would most certainly do it now. If you’re looking for a sign that you’re in the wrong club . . . this is it. If you didn’t know the mainstream media promoting this nonsense is nothing more than a shill for Big Pharma, let this be your wake-up call.
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The AAP on Jan. 9 issued [ [link removed] ] its “first clinical practice guideline (CPG) outlining evidence-based evaluation and treatment of children and adolescents with overweight and obesity,” . . . and we wish they wouldn’t have.
The APP didn’t issue guidance on actually preventing obesity. They’re going to bestow upon us this dog poop disguised as potpourri in a “forthcoming update.” No, they’re focusing on the “solutions” that could permanently damage children and bring in billions for Big Harma (pun intended).
They said they didn’t go down prevention avenue because there are apparently “no studies [ [link removed] ] reporting results of obesity prevention interventions that met their criteria for review.” I literally cannot make this up. What they meant to say is that there are some new “anti-obesity” drugs that just hit the market for kids and only rubbish like this is going to sell it.
No more “watchful waiting" or delaying treatment [ [link removed] ] to see if children “outgrow obesity,” they say in their statement, as if we have no clue what causes obesity (overeating) or how to address it (caloric deficit) in the first place.
They’re under the assumption that parents concerned with their child’s weight are anxiously waiting around as their children stuff themselves full of Little Debbie snack cakes wondering if today will be the day their child wakes up at a normal weight.
The AAP apparently has no idea what causes obesity, so they’ve decided to focus on drugs and surgery. Have they not watched “My 600-lb Life?”
In their guidance, the AAP says childhood obesity results from a “multifactorial set of socioecological, environmental, and genetic influences that act on children and families” and that “individuals exposed to adversity can have alterations in immunologic, metabolic, and epigenetic processes that increase the risk for obesity by altering energy regulation.”
They make it sound so complicated, but reality tells us that obesity is actually caused by overeating — i.e., intaking more calories than your body needs, or a lack of activity or exercise — i.e., intaking more calories than your body uses. With rare exceptions, it is really that simple.
And sure, we as humans are prone to turning to food to soothe our emotional upsets, but as a parent, it’s our job to help our children learn proper coping skills, not abdicate that responsibility, let our kids gorge themselves on junk, and then put them on drugs in lieu of making the lifestyle changes we need to make.
As if it couldn’t get worse, the authors of these brilliant guidelines did decide to address one obvious cause of obesity . . . racism.
“These influences tend to be more prevalent among children who have experienced negative environmental and SDoHs, such as racism,” they state. But, it didn’t stop there.
The AAP continues:
Inequalities in poverty, unemployment, and homeownership attributable to structural racism have been linked to increased obesity rates. Racism experienced in everyday life has also been associated with increased obesity prevalence. Youth with overweight and obesity have been found to be at increased risk not only for weight-based harassment but also for sexual harassment and harassment based on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender.
So racism is to blame for obesity even though during historical periods where racism was far worse, we did not have an obesity problem, nor did 14% of white youth struggle with the same condition [ [link removed] ]. I’m sure I don’t need to go further down this rabbit trail other than to say this card is consistently played by the elite to manipulate people who would otherwise be questioning the misinformation they’re reading into conforming.
Do you know what isn’t mentioned anywhere in the AAP’s guidance? Nutrition, exercise, and the effects the COVID lockdowns they supported had on children and their waistlines.
The AAP acknowledged overweight and obesity is more common in children who live in poverty, underresourced communities, in families that have immigrated, but the solution isn’t to provide these families with affordable food and resources — it’s to pump their children full of drugs at the tune of several thousand per month and sign them up for medical procedures.
AAP says obesity isn’t a personal or lifestyle problem
According to Dr. Sandra Hassink, medical director for the AAP Institute for Healthy Childhood Weight, and a co-author of the guidelines, the new guidelines aim to reset [ [link removed] ] the inaccurate view of obesity as “a personal problem, maybe a failure of the person’s diligence.”
“This is no different than you have asthma and now we have an inhaler for you,” Hassink said. Dr. Aaron Kelly, co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota says obesity is a “biological problem” and that the “condition is a complex, chronic disease.”
He went a step further and actually stated to the Associated Press that obesity is not a “lifestyle problem” or a “lifestyle disease.”
“These are the most comprehensive, patient-centered guidelines we have had that address overweight and obesity within childhood,” Dr. Rebecca Carter, pediatrician at the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital and assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told CNN in an email [ [link removed] ] on Monday.
“New to these recommendations are several new medication management strategies that have proven very successful in the treatment of obesity as a chronic disease for adults, and are now being recommended for use in children and adolescents,” Carter wrote. “This is a major step in allowing overweight and obesity to be considered as the chronic diseases that they are.”
These are “doctors” in white coats spouting this nonsense. You can look back at pictures over the past century and see that people didn’t struggle with obesity. They also weren’t sedentary and didn’t eat foods void of nutrition from a box. They struggled and they experienced wars, depression, racism, and hardships of the likes we have never seen, and yet, obesity was not a thing — nor were obesity drugs.
AAP guidance is strategically timed with new anti-obesity drugs for kids
According to the Associated Press, the guidelines [ [link removed] ] are strategically timed with the approval of new drug treatments for obesity in kids. Last month, Wegovy was approved for children ages 12 and older. It’s a weekly injection of a drug that could cause a host of problems and costs $1,300 per month. That’s the price of a mortgage or a family of six’s entire monthly grocery budget.
Within days of the Dec. 23 authorization, pediatrician Dr. Claudia Fox (who I would never send my child to) had prescribed the drug a 12-year-old girl.
“What it offers patients is the possibility of even having an almost normal body mass index,” said Fox. “It’s like a whole different level of improvement.”
According to the AAP, body mass index, or BMI, is a “measure used to screen for excess body adiposity. It is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters.”
This is another glaring example of how the AAP, and most medical professionals, have no understanding of what true health and nutrition look like. Do you know why we shouldn’t be putting people in categories based on their BMI or gearing treatments towards reducing BMI? Because it’s not an accurate measure of one’s health.
Ask anyone in the fitness world with those great bodies you see on Instagram what their BMI is. They’ll tell you they don’t track it. Muscle mass, even in lean people, puts people in the “overweight” BMI category that would warrant this treatment. Body builders, crossfitters, the “fittest” people in the world, all have high BMIs. They’re also far healthier than the general population.
Case in point. Here’s a picture of my husband and I . . . with our high BMIs. My husband’s insurance company puts him in the “overweight” category every year based on his BMI. The more he works out and the more muscle mass he gains, the more “overweight” he is. The man (a professional athlete) who owns our gym is considered “obese” based on his BMI.
It’s science, right?
As a lawyer, who also happens to be a naturopath with certifications in nutrition and exercise science, I’m not going to tell you what to do, nor can I give medical advice, nor would I want to. What I will encourage you to do is use common sense as the filter by which you sift any recommendation handed down by the AAP. This is a corrupt organization that is not focused on issuing evidenced-based recommendations supported by actual objective science (or even reality).
They have an obvious agenda and it’s geared toward creating endless customers for pharmaceutical companies, not our children.
Megan Redshaw is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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