Pediatric Research Update: Food as Medicine for Obesity Treatment and Management

Each month, the OMA Pediatric Committee reviews a pediatric-focused obesity research update to help keep you up to date about the latest findings. This month’s update explores how dietary interventions, guided by culinary medicine principles, can support sustainable weight management and improve overall health outcomes in pediatric and adolescent populations.

Article Summary

This article explores dietary interventions for obesity, emphasizing personalized nutrition plans, evidence-based culinary medicine, and sustainable diets like Mediterranean and DASH. It highlights calorie reduction, meal timing, and weight maintenance strategies.

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Article Review

February is the month of love, and everyone plans to take the most important person in their lives on an unforgettable date. Have you ever wondered about going on a date with your physician. How nice would it be to spend a day grocery shopping, picking fresh produce from the kitchen garden and cooking together to treat each other to a healthy, sumptuous and pocket efficient meal?

Culinary medicine is an evidence-based approach to nutrition education, which blends the art of cooking with the science of medicine. The demonstrated benefits of teaching kitchen classes include food cost savings, increased nutrition and culinary knowledge, and improved confidence in the ability to regularly practice a healthier diet.

The task of overcoming obesity seems cumbersome and extremely difficult to achieve. It reminds us of the extreme passion, inspiration and scientific methods that went into stepping our first step on the moon. In the words of Neil Armstrong, ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Similarly, in obesity medicine, a small step like dietary intervention can represent a giant leap towards successful weight management..

The article being discussed this month is a narrative review of articles from PubMed based on nutrition and treatment of obesity. In clinical practice, a patient’s nutrition plan must be individualized based on age, food preference, cultural preference, lifestyle, and concurrent medical diseases.

The goal of nutrition intervention is to reduce the total calorie intake. Altered macronutrient composition and the quality of dietary macronutrients often shift mediators of caloric intake and diet sustainability, such as satiety and fullness, with the goal to improve adherence to an energy-restricted diet.

Weight Maintenance

A low-calorie diet that incorporates fruit, vegetables, healthy fat, protein, and whole-grain carbohydrates is effective for weight maintenance. This principle can be achieved by consuming more home-cooked meals using unprocessed whole foods and/or eating smaller, more frequent meals and also eating breakfast regularly. Other behaviors important to weight maintenance are frequent monitoring of food intake, weighing oneself at least once a week, and engaging in a high level of physical activity.

Nutrition in pediatrics and adolescents

Excessive weight gain that occurs over childhood is generally due to an imbalance of calories-in vs calories-out. Dieting in children should also be handled with caution and overseen by a clinician as part of a supervised medical program given the association of fad diets and other restrictive food intake behaviors with significant risks, including disordered eating. In addition, many children with obesity benefit from slowed weight gain rather than frank weight loss during times of vertical growth and pubertal changes. Longitudinal data sets tracking food consumption and weight over time have shown that excess weight gain is associated with consumption of fat spreads (eg, butter and margarine), coated poultry and fish (ie, battered), potatoes prepared in oil (including French fries and potato chips), desserts, and sugar-sweetened beverages. School-based interventions have positively affected the quality of foods consumed.

Conclusion

Multiple studies illustrate that the best nutrition practice is one that is sustainable long term. Therefore, a shift to focus on diet quality with increased micronutrient density and consumption of less ultra-processed foods are key to achieving satiety, weight loss, and eventual weight maintenance.