What Doctors and Parents Can Do
Preventing heart disease in adulthood begins with reducing risks early in life. Both a child’s doctor and parents have roles to play, researchers and cardiologists say.
Pediatricians and family practitioners should:
* Obtain family health history, including whether parents, grandparents or siblings have had heart attacks, strokes or early heart disease.
* Provide dietary guidelines, including limits on the consumption of fatty foods.
* Recommend physical activity.
* Discourage sedentary behavior, such as extended television viewing or computer time.
* Monitor weight, height and body-mass index, which is a relationship of weight to height, as well as waist measurement.
* Check blood pressure.
* Measure cholesterol and triglycerides, another type of blood fat linked to heart disease.
Parents should:
* Help kids maintain a healthy weight and, if necessary, lose any excess pounds, based on a doctor’s recommendation for what’s appropriate based on their age and height.
* Encourage them to participate in vigorous exercise at least 30 minutes three times a week.
* Limit daily calories to levels recommended by doctors and nutritionists that assure proper nutrition for normal growth and development.
* Limit the percentage of daily calories from fat to no more than 30%, limit saturated fat to no more than 10% of daily calories and cholesterol to 300 milligrams, lower only if a doctor recommends it, because children need some fat in their diet for proper development.
* Stop smoking.
--Jane E. Allen
