Childhood_Obesity

CHILDHOOD OBESITY 1 Childhood Obesity Rodney A. Neal ENG 122 Dr. Shelley Lawyer November 17, 2011 CHILDHOOD OBESITY 2 Childhood obesity has increased and been on the rise at a very alarming rate over the years. In today’s stats, nearly one in every five children is fighting the obesity epidemic and they are losing. The children are finding it very hard when there is junk food everywhere they look, being displayed at the grocery store shelves, and lit up by bright light on every corner in a vending machine. Then there are the brutal and never ending fast food restaurant advertisement campaigns on every television channel. But this is only just the beginning of the obesity epidemic. The lack of exercise and monitored eating is a very huge contributor to the source of childhood obesity. A lot of kids now days spend way too much time sitting on the couch in front of their XBOX 360’s and Playstation 3’s and not enough time outside running around or in a gym working up a sweat and working off the fat in their body. Childhood obesity is not alone; it also brings issues that are life treating for the child. They will have to deal with co- morbidities like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, respiratory ailments, sleep apnea and depression. These are just a few of the common problems linked to childhood obesity. Others are increased likelihood of having elevated cholesterol raised CHILDHOOD OBESITY 3 systolic blood pressure, experience of early menarche which links with future instances of breast cancer and increase risk of cardiovascular disease (Ruxton 2004), what a lot of people do not realize is that these are all large issues that are associated to childhood obesity. Many people are confused and just do not know when their child should start digesting healthy foods. Well this should start at infancy with breast milk or the correct formula. You can really never go wrong with breast milk because it is the only source with the richest proteins and substance for your child. But there is a big part of the women in the world that does not want to breastfeed. The mothers are more concerned because they are overweight and think that they will pass it on to their child. But it is just the opposite; breast milk will reduce the chances of the child being obese. However, from the study that was conducted proved the regardless of the mother’s weight and diabetic status, the infant equally benefited from the mother’s breast milk (Mayer-Davis 2006). A big thing that leads to bad eating habits is the fact that mothers have the tendency to feed their kids solid foods before their time. How many times do you go into the local McDonalds, Burger King, or CHILDHOOD OBESITY 4 Golden Corral and see mothers with their infant to 3 year old child and they are feeding the kid mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese or pre chewed pieces of meat' Things like this is what set the pace for childhood obesity. Some mothers push this and not willing knowing how they are messing up their child’s livelihood. This in turn sets the kid mentally to always want these foods when it is time to eat their meals and it just is neither cute nor acceptable. The child is consuming way too many sugars and starches way too early in life. Their bodies are just not capable of processing them correctly and fast enough. These half processed foods cause a lot of fat production and in turn leads to poor organ functioning that put a strain growing joints. There was a study done by the American Obesity Association (AOA); over 30% of parents were concerned of their children’s weight, yet only 5.6% of those parents chose “being overweight or obese” as their child’s greatest long-term health risk (Childhood Obesity). But to teach and discuss the effects of childhood obesity with the parents and the children is a start to the positive in helping to prevent childhood obesity. Parents need to help in the process of changing their kids’ lifestyle in the prevention of childhood obesity. Other than CHILDHOOD OBESITY 5 pushing healthier foods and monitoring their food intake, the parents should push a more physical lifestyle also. If you look back at when you were a child your parents always told you to go outside and play. You grew up with bikes and a big imagination. You would be outside with your friends and you would ride bikes, roller skates, and just play games that would constantly have you in motion. But those days have been replaced with a large assortment of television shows, gaming systems, and bad parenting. You can see kids now days just sitting on the couch wasting their lives away. A kid can wake up on a Monday morning and plan their entire week around sitting on the couch watching television shows while playing their gaming systems and not to exclude eating snacks and high cholesterol fatty foods. This is when parents should intervene and create a more physical and healthier environment for their children. The parent could introduce the fact of doing chores around the house to help keep the body moving and burning fat. If the parent have more than one child, the parent can make a game out of get the chores completed by the children with rewards if need be when the kids are complete with each assigned chore. But the best solution would be for each parent to just limit the time that their kids CHILDHOOD OBESITY 6 spend stationary behind the video gaming system, computers, and the television. But if the kid is still spending a great amount of time sitting idle during the day the introduction of fruit and vegetables intake should increase and replace the consumption of potatoes chips and cookies. Also to have your kid drink water and fruit juice with no or very little sugar in them would help too. The child must have a body-mass index (BMI) of greater or equal to 40% or be more than 100 pounds overweight, must have high risk co-morbidities potentially other problems that interfere with lifestyles (Henry 2005). So to see this in a simpler manner, you take your kids weight in pounds and divide it by your kid’s height in inches by two. You take that and multiple it by 703 and you would have the body mass index of your child. So if your child weighs 150 pounds and was 63 inches tall you child would have a body mass index of 26.5 percent. This would put your child overweight. The body mass index in broken down into four categories. You have the first one which starts at 18.5 percent and below as being underweight. The second one ranges from 18.5 percent to 24.9 percent as normal. The next one is 25.0 percent to 29.9 percent as being CHILDHOOD OBESITY 7 overweight. The fourth and final one is considered obese and it ranges 30.0 percent and above. The body mass index is just a tool to help see where you kid stands at in the health of his or her life and amongst the rest of the kids in the world. Being obese is such a burden now days in our kid’s life. You really can’t blame them for not having the education on preventing the obesity, especially when the adults have not been properly educated on the subject matter of childhood obesity themselves. Then there are the factors of parents using surgery to add in preventing childhood obesity. I say to ad in preventing because the surgery is a last chance option and it is in most cases only a temporally fix for the child. The surgery is called pediatric bariatric surgery, which is a surgery to physically limit calorie intake and to induce weight loss for obese individuals. The health risk of this surgery is high; a lot of the concern is over whether the surgery is safe for adolescent and will it effectively maintain weight loss. I say that the surgery is a risk that the parents will lose. To have you child put though this surgery is just a lost of time because they are still growing, and who to say that they will start eating right or actually exercising after the parents have paid for the CHILDHOOD OBESITY 8 pediatric bariatric surgery. However childhood obesity is not yet labeled as a disease: therefore, families will likely bear the entire cost of the surgical procedure (Henry 2005). Childhood obesity is a health issue that we as parents have to look at more seriously. We can always say what the child is doing wrong and punish them for doing nothing and squatting on the couch doing nothing all day. But the question is what do we do to prevent these things from happening and are we really looking in the mirror and seeing what is actually promoting our kids to be the way they are' It really could be that they are just the reflection of us as parents and mimicking our bad habits. Maybe the parents should push to go see the school nurse or the pediatric nurse at the clinic and get educated on how to prevent childhood obesity and get a diet plan for them and make it a team mission and you both slim down into a heartier and healthier life. CHILDHOOD OBESITY 9 References Ruxton, Carie. (2004). Obesity In Children. Nursing Standard, (18)20, 47-55. Mayer-Davis, E.J., Rifas-Shiman, S.L., Zhou, L., Hu, F.B., Colditz, G.A., & Gillman, M.W. (2006). Breast-feeding and risk for childhood obesity: Does material diabetes or obesity status matter' Childhood Obesity (nod). retrieved November 16, 2011, from http://www.obesity.org.subs.childhood/prevention.shtml. Henry, Linda L. (2005). Childhood Obesity: What can be done to help today’s youth' Pediatric Nursing, (31)1, 13-16.