Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Twenty five percent of children in the US are overweight and becoming obese (Bellows & Roach, 2009). Childhood obesity is becoming a disorder with both physical and physiological health risks. This disorder is believed to have multiple causes including lifestyle preferences and environmental factors. Other major issues causing children to become overweight include excessive amounts of sugar intake from soft drinks, decline in physical activity, and lunches provided at schools. A school lunch program is not the only factor causing obesity in children. Parents play an extremely important part in their children lives too, whether it is food consumption or physical activity. Physical activity seems to be declining each year and has been taken over by pursuits such as television watching and video game playing. The last contributor to obese children in American is advertisements. Food is the number one product children seen advertised each day. 35% of food commercials are seen through the eyes of a child, which calculates to 21 food ads each day (Kaiser, 2008). These food ads consist of candy and snacks, fast food chains, sodas, and restaurants. What used to be a small problem has now become an epidemic in America. If children do not start making changes to their everyday life, unfortunately their life span will be cut short. My position is that if parents, schools, and advertisements start to realize this growing problem, children's lives will be changed dramatically.

In America, one and five children have been diagnosed with obesity within the last 20 years and the numbers continue to increase at an alarming rate (Wright, 2010). Statistics show that if these patterns continue in the future, within the next 20 years, almost every child in America will be living with diabetes, heart disease, and have a shorter life expectancy. There are many factors that cause these children to gain an excessive amount of weight at such an early age. The main issues causing childhood obesity include schools, parents, and advertisements. Schools are not only unhealthy but many do not provide the correct amount of nutrition or physical activity. Encouraging your children to eat healthy and be active is what most young households are lacking these days. Advertisements do not promote healthy eating either. Commercial and magazine advertisements promote young children to eat cheap, greasy food for a low price. In the United States, over 11 million children are obese and numbers are intended to multiply each year (Wright, 2010). The lifestyles children are brought up into are to blame, not only in the home but also in the schools and surrounding distractions. This crisis is causing lasting psychological effects on obese children. Obesity is the biggest health issue facing children, and needs to be conquered.

Children spend most of their day in school and their lifestyle and behavioral choices are developed during the school-age years. School lunches are one of the top contestants to blame for childhood obesity. More than 70 percent of schools provide high-fat, salty, sugary food during the day. Having a choice between pizza and fries or hamburgers and hotdogs is simply only teaching kids bad lifestyle choices. Elementary schools provide excessive amounts of unhealthy selections without offering one healthy one like a salad bar. Many schools also have snack bars, vending machines, and student stores that offer snacks that are high in fat and sugar as well. In several schools in Michigan, 1,000 6th graders that ate lunch from their school cafeteria were overweight opposed to the children who packed a bagged lunch from home. "Most schools rely heavily on high-energy, low-nutrient value, because it is cheaper", said Dr. Kim A. Eagle, director of the Cardiovascular Center in Michigan (Rabin, 2011). Providing school programs that encourage physical activity every day is important for containing children's weight control. These programs may consist of physical education classes that emphasize health-related fitness activities, after-school sports, and other activities requiring specific athletic abilities. In 2001, only half of elementary school students had physical education classes and less than one third of these students had physical education daily (Collin, 2011).

Parents are role models for their children's actions, behaviors, and habits. These good traits start in the home and progress throughout a child's life. Children tend to follow a parents lead whether its food consumption or physical activity. A new study proved that parents are the number one contributors to the growing obesity problem among young children. Researchers also found that young children are more likely to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day if their parents do, although parents who drink soda and eat fast food will influence their children to do the same (Stein, 2004).

While parents are the primary role models for their children and their behaviors can positively or negatively influence their children's health, it is also essential that local officials representing low-income communities work to expand access to fruit, vegetables and other healthful foods, (LiveScience staff, Feb).

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