Earlier today I posted a link on my Facebook page to a very interesting article that I came across in "The Biologist". The article looks into the issue of denying obese women access to fertility treatment on the NHS. You can read it here in full (http://www.lovefittraining.com/IVF_article.pdf), but below are the salient points:
- Increasing numbers of couples require IVF, but funding for fertility treatment is increasingly being restricted.
- Obese women are more susceptible to fertility problems, and problems during pregnancy.
- Some PCTs use extra criteria to determine which couples should be prioritised, most controversially the BMI <30 limit, because women with a BMI >30 are less likely to be successful with their IVF treatment.
- However the time it might take for a women to lose enough weight to significantly reduce her BMI could actually reduce her chance of conceiving, due to the fact that fertility decreases with age.
- Perhaps most importantly the government should be concentrating on the importance of getting to a healthy weight before trying to get pregnant at all.
As a pre- and post-natal exercise specialist this article certainly caught my attention. But more than anything, I picked up on the sad fact that more and more women are obese. Whilst I could have a private chuckle and say that it's good for business(!), the truth is that this is a very serious matter. Modern day living is literally "feeding" this epidemic. I mean, come on, we live in times when there are adverts on the television showing families supposedly bonding and getting fit together playing a computer game! Whatever happened to good old fashioned taking a walk together? Or football in the park? When I was a kid we used to climb trees and run around, and my Dad took us swimming every weekend. I know that many people reading this won't fall into the category of couch potato, but the number of people who do is shocking.
What's even more shocking is the fact that this lfestyle of inactivity and over-eating is not restricted to the developed world. Having recently spent 3 weeks in Thailand and Cambodia I can honestly say that I was horrified at the number of fat Thais I saw. I'm not sure that I'm allowed to say "fat Thais", but I've said it because it's the truth, and I was genuinely surprised to see overweight people in that part of the world. To give this a bit of perspective, my observations were really only in Bangkok. In the more remote areas that I visited, the locals were slim, active and had a more humble diet. Funnily enough I didn't see a single overweight person living in the rural hill villages! And at the Temples of Angkor there were Khmer (Cambodian) Grannies who'd put many British teenagers to shame, clambering up steep ruins in the 45 degree heat with little effort! In Bangkok, however, it's notably more westernised. In fact, Bangkok is a relatively wealthy city with a thriving financial district and a large number of enormous shopping malls. This was the real culture shock for me: Huge malls with i-max cinemas, Ferrari dealerships on the 5th floor (no joke!) and then an absolutely massive food court in the basement. Sure, there were all the types of noodle restaurants as expected but what I wasn't prepared for was the presence of bakeries, ice-cream parlours, and the usual fast-food suspects (yep, good old Maccy D's and Starbucks everywhere)!
Perhaps this was slight naivety on my part - I've travelled a fair bit in my time and saw Pizza Hut in Peru in 2003, so why be surprised by Ben & Jerry's in Bangkok in 2011? Well, it's not the presence of the foods, so much as the effects they appear to have had. Whilst in Bangkok I met up with a friend who lives there. She spent some time in Thailand 7 years ago and is now living there again, having returned at Christmas time. She said that she was gob-smacked by the change in body shape of the locals. Apparently when she was there before, you simply didn't see overweight Thais (although obesity was already prevalent back home), but now there are "muffin tops" aplenty!
The point I'm making is that Thailand is not alone. Obesity is a very real epidemic and is evidently spreading way beyond the West. So if Thailand can experience such a shift in less than a decade, it's no wonder we're seeing such drastic measures as depriving obese women fertility treatment here in the UK!
Some food for thought, no? Excuse the pun.
From Cressi:
ReplyDeleteThe obesity epidemic was made worse when they realigned the BMI categories back in the 90s, making originally 'normal' and 'overweight' women instantly 'overweight' and 'obese'.
An underweight woman has more problems with her fertility than ...an obese woman.
The reason for the huge increase in fatness is due largely to the widespread uptake of dieting. Dieters put weight back on (and normally a bit more) in something like 75-90% of all cases.
Exercise is a great idea though - and there is a fantastic newish movement out there called Health At Every Size which redefines a lot of what we have thought about weight and health - I recommend you having a look at it.See More