The Childhood ‘Solution’ That Should Terrify Every Parent

Something has shifted in American pediatrics. After the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in 2023 that doctors offer weight-loss medication to children as young as 12, prescriptions of GLP-1 drugs such as Wegovy and Saxenda for kids jumped sharply almost overnight, and they have climbed every month since. Clinical trials are now underway to push ...

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Something has shifted in American pediatrics. After the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in 2023 that doctors offer weight-loss medication to children as young as 12, prescriptions of GLP-1 drugs such as Wegovy and Saxenda for kids jumped sharply almost overnight, and they have climbed every month since. Clinical trials are now underway to push these drugs to children younger than 12. We are, in effect, deciding that the cure for a childhood spent eating processed foods and addicted to screens is a weekly injection that reengineers a developing brain’s hunger signals. Have we fallen so far off the cliff that we must inject our kids to lead them down a healthy path? This is not a solution.

There are some adults with serious metabolic conditions for whom these medications can be a genuine tool. But we have to address our cultural disease at the roots. “Let food be thy medicine” could never ring truer than it does at this pivotal juncture.

Clearly, in this instance, GLP-1 drugs are a Band-Aid stretched over a wound not yet cleaned up. They suppress appetite; they do not teach a child what to eat and how to move. They lower a number on a scale; they do not change a home or a school cafeteria. The moment a child stops taking them, the weight tends to return because the underlying habits never change, and all of the issues will be exacerbated. Are we truly willing to commit a generation of kids to lifelong pharmaceutical dependence when basic, wholesome meals and daily outside play is usually all that’s needed?

The food put in front of children is the real scandal. Roughly 70% of the calories American children eat now come from ultra-processed foods, the engineered snacks and drinks designed in laboratories to override the body’s natural sense of fullness. We have built an environment that makes children sick and then act surprised when they are.

The MAHA Commission’s report last year, “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” named this plainly, pointing to poor diet, environmental toxins, physical inactivity, and the over-medicalization of childhood as the roots of a genuine crisis in chronic disease. It’s good to have a clear prognosis on the dire state of things, but the real shift needs to start at dinner tables and in schools. We need to bring back simple, time-tested wisdom and real foods from God’s green earth.

The good news is that the solution is not complicated, and it does not require a prescription. It requires basic foods. Start with protein at every meal, especially a real breakfast, the kind that steadies a child through a school morning instead of delivering the sugar spike and crash of a toaster pastry. Fill the plate with vegetables until they become ordinary rather than a negotiation. Get kids moving their bodies every day, not as punishment, but as play, the way childhood is supposed to be. And cut the processed foods and refined sugars that are doing the damage.

None of this is exotic. It is exactly how previous generations of healthy children were raised before their nutrition was outsourced to vending machines, cafeterias that offer mac and cheese or pizza, and drive-throughs.

We’ve been working with women and their families for the last 15 years, and our latest book, “The 7 Skills to Lasting Health,” provides all of these tools in a simple, accessible way. We’d be happy to make it available as a curriculum for schools nationwide. But, if you don’t know where to start, this is an easy on-ramp.

This is not merely a matter of personal health. A nation whose children are growing up sicker, weaker, and more medicated than their parents is a nation weakening at its foundation. When military recruiters struggle to find young people fit to serve and when the cost to treat the epidemic of chronic disease consumes an ever-larger share of our economy, the health of our children stops being a private concern and becomes a question of national strength.

We may be celebrating 250 years of America, but a country cannot lead the world while its next generation is too unwell to carry it forward. We have a clear choice in front of us. We can keep treating the symptoms, normalizing injections for children addicted to their screens and hoping the bill never comes due. Or we can do the harder, better thing and address this at its root, one breakfast, one home-cooked dinner, one afternoon outside at a time.

The drugs will always be there for the few who truly need them for breakthrough. But for the millions who simply need real food and a healthier life, reaching for the syringe first is a failure. Our children are our future. They deserve more than a bandage. They deserve to be made well.

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Pearl Barrett and Serene Allison are New York Times bestselling authors and the founders of Trim Healthy Mama.

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