Abundant fat, starch, sugar force adult ailments on kids
A 10-year-old boy on medication for high blood pressure.
An 8-year-old treated for high cholesterol.
A 7-year-old girl diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
Southern Arizona children are suffering from adult afflictions - and doctors blame it on a troubling surge in childhood obesity.
In Arizona, 31 percent of children between 10 and 17 are overweight or obese, experts say.
Lifestyle, diet and genetics play a role, but the biggest common denominator among them is socioeconomic.
"It's an amazingly paradoxical problem," says Dr. Tracey Kurtzman, an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Arizona's College of Medicine. "If you think about poor people in the rest of the world, they are emaciated and skinny and impoverished and malnourished. Here, our poor population is malnourished with too much."
Cheap food is often unhealthy. There's no Arizona law mandating physical education in schools. High-crime neighborhoods mean running and playing outdoors is discouraged. Gym memberships or club sports are not feasible for families challenged to provide basic necessities.
"It's costly to eat a healthy diet," says Tucson writer Reva Mariah S. Gover-Shield Chief, 41, who prioritizes her budget to eat healthy now that she's dealing with myriad health problems linked to being overweight since age 5. "Oyster mushrooms are expensive!
"I think the real weight problem we've got going on right now," she says, "is called poverty."
Small budgets, big barriers
Arizona in general has been behind the rest of the nation in its prevalence of obese and overweight residents, but over the past decade the problem here increased at a faster rate than in most other states,