Super-Sized Mamas

The epidemic of obesity seen around the world - and particularly noted in North America and Europe - may yet do more to threaten human survival, if the phenomenon persists - than the plague of deadly new diseases, the threat of nuclear weapons unleashed on an unready world, and the looming environmental crisis with its fall-out of vital food shortages.

We may end up eating ourselves to an early grave. Our morbidly overweight bodies succumbing to a collapse of our internal organs, incapable of bearing our unwieldy weight.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? We don't particularly enjoy the flabby sight of our corpulent bodies. We don't appreciate the growing lack of mobility, the freedom to move at will, to exercise our limbs, our lungs and our heart. We cannot possibly anticipate with glowing pleasure the onslaught of life-impeding, lifestyle diseases like cancers, diabetes - with all of its potentials of blindness, neurological damage, increasing risk of heart and stroke.

So why do we succumb to the allure of consuming too many and nutritionally inadequate calories? Helpless to exercise free will and a modicum of intelligence?

And why do we teach our children to do the same? Does it give us great pleasure to contemplate the damage we are assisting our children to incur through this undisciplined and vicious cycle of over-consumption? Do we take much pleasure in realizing that normal clothing no longer fits us or our offspring. That something as simple as a long walk, climbing stairs, playing physically-demanding games are beyond our functional capabilities due to our impaired physical status?

And here's yet another emerging problem. Expectant mothers who are so obese - with BMIs ranging between 30 to 50 - that normal hospital delivery beds and surgical devices are inadequate to serve these new mothers-to-be inordinate girth. Statistics Canada has revealed that fully 23% of women of childbearing age are obese, with obesity rates rising fastest in the 25- to 34-year-old group.

The medical community labels anyone with a body mass index of 30 or over obese. And obstetricians are now saying it's no longer uncommon to see women with a pre-pregnancy BMI of 60, or even greater than that. And then the birth weight is totted in over that. With such high BMIs there is a greater C-section mode of delivery required.

The attending physician, during pregnancy check-ups can not feel the uterus, can't hear the baby's heart beat; there is no normal clinical assessment possible with the morbidly obese.

Labour and delivery are compromised. It's more difficult for the baby's delivery, and where, during normal births one attending surgeon is sufficient, in these instances, two and three surgeons are required for the necessary caesarean procedures. All that fat has to be held back out of the way of delivery.

A BMI greater than 30 translates to a higher stillbirth risk, gestational diabetes, and life-threatening pre-eclampsia. Moreover, babies born grossly weighted to begin with, are at an increased risk of overweight during adolescence. How agile and adept at looking after their babies are grossly overweight women?

It takes a lot of energy and stamina, patience and skill to attend to a newborn, to an infant, to a growing child. A woman housed within acres of redundant flesh is incapacitated to begin with. Where will that needed strength, energy, and will to provide for the young come from?

It's not as though there's any great mystery that gross overweight will impact deleteriously on one's present mode of life and lifestyle, but that in the long run life itself is truncated. It's a situation that truly defies intelligent design.