Child Obesity
Child Obesity
Treatment is an unnecessary option when you could prevent child obesity. Prevention focuses basically on parent education. In infancy, parent education ought to center on breastfeeding, recognition of signals of satiety, and delayed introduction of solid foods.
In early childhood, focus education on proper nutrition, selection of low-fat snacks, good eating habits (good balance of vegetables & fruit, proteins & GOOD fats) good exercise/activity habits, and monitoring of television viewing.
In cases where preventive measures cannot totally overcome the influence of hereditary factors, parent can focus on building self-esteem and address psychological issues.
Child Obesity, Soda & Sweet Drinks
The consumption of sweetened drinks which includes sodas, juice and other beverages such as Kool-Aid and sports drinks, has been on the rise in the past decades. At the same time, the prevalence of obesity in children also has risen.
Don't drink your calories. Soda, fruit juice (even 100 percent juice), whole or 2 percent milk, sports drinks, Kool-Aid and other sweetened beverages all contain a lot of calories. What's worse, they do little to fill you up and provide little or no nutritional benefit.
You may not know that . . .
A 12-ounce glass of orange juice contains 180 calories, which is the same as eating three chocolate-chip cookies.
Drinking just one 12-ounce can of soda every day for a year is equal to 55,000 calories or 15 pounds a year.
Juice ... Not as Healthy as Fruit
Many people think of juice as an essential part of a child's diet. However, juice isn't as healthy as people think.
Drinking a lot of juice makes younger children feel full quickly. Feeling full from juice will decrease the amount of food a child eats. For older children, drinking a lot of juice doesn't usually cause fullness and the excess calories from juice can result in weight gain.
It's much healthier to eat the fruit rather than drink the juice. For example, a 12-ounce glass of orange juice, which is the juice of two to three oranges, has about 180 calories . But eating one orange is only 80 or 90 calories and it does more to fill you up.
For children who are overweight, the basic recommendation is no juice.
Sodas ... Liquid Sugar
Sodas and other sweetened drinks are full of sugar such as high-fructose corn syrup. Many sodas also contain caffeine, which is a diuretic that can cause dehydration. Another problem with sweetened soda and other beverages is that the body doesn't register it's full after drinking hundreds of calories. This may have to do with ghrelin, the hormone in your stomach that lets you know when you're hungry. When the hormone increases, you are hungry.
When you eat, the hormone goes down. However, it only works with food, not liquid. Drinking soda, juice, sports drinks and other sugar-sweetened liquids does nothing for your hunger, even if you consume hundreds of calories. As a result, sugar-sweetened soda & beverages are often wasted calories.
In other words, the human digestive system is not designed for drinking calories. Soda is a relatively recent addition to the human diet. Soda was introduced in the second half of the 19th century and there was not an obesity problem until the 20th century. When looking at obesity in the United States alongside fructose and soft drink and soda consumption, they are on a parallel line.
How Bad Is Soda Really?
To fully understand the impact of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages, consider how the extra calories from these drinks translates into pounds. Remember that 1 pound of fat equals 3,500 calories.
If a child drinks one soda and two glasses of Kool-Aid each day, they are consuming roughly:
150 calories for the glass of soda
240 calories for two glass of Kool-Aid (120 calories each glass)
TOTAL: 390 calories a day
The one soda and two glasses of Kool-Aid equals 390 calories each day.
If a child drinks one soda and two glasses of Kool-Aid each day for one year, they're consuming:
- 142,000 calories a year
- 390 calories a day for 365 days in a year = 142,000 calories
Since 1 pound equals 3,500 calories:
- 142,000 calories at 3,500 calories per pound = 40 pounds
That means 142,000 calories over a year is 40 pounds of weight a year.
What seemed like a harmless glass of soda and two glasses of Kool-Aid a day is equal to roughly 40 pounds of weight gain over a year. Children rarely burn all of these extra calories through exercise and activity. Even if a child only has one soda a day, it leads to 15.6 pounds of weight a year.
What Can You Do?
The best thing for children and their parents is to limit or eliminate drinking juice, soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.
Instead of soda, juice and other sweetened beverages, your child should drink water. Water has everything you need and nothing you don't. The benefits of water include the following:
- Quenches your thirst
- Has no added sodium to make you thirstier
- Has zero calories
In addition to water, children can drink nonfat milk and beverages with little or no sodium and five or less calories per serving, such as:
- Sparkling water, without sugar added
- low-calorie beverages like Crystal Light consumed occasionally as a treat
Remember: children should consume 2-4 servings of calcium-rich foods a day like non-fat or 1% milk.
Reference
Source: www.ucsfhealth.org, Last updated May 8, 2007
Childhood Obesity in America
According to the World Health Organization , the rate of childhood obesity has tripled since 1966. They also say that 80% of obese children will carry that trend into adulthood. Obese children see higher incidences of type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, and poor self-esteem.
Breakfast cereals are loaded with sugar and many children survive on a diet low in nutrition and heavy on fast food. Physical education programs in schools have been pushed aside to make room for more academic classes.
The television and video games have replaced outdoor playtime. A National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that 26% of children in the United States watched at least 4 hours of television daily. They also noted that these children were far less likely to participate in physical activity.
Parents can prevent children from becoming overweight. Feed children a diet of healthy and nutritious meals and snacks and make sure they are physically active daily.
Get out there with your kids and play. Sports like soccer, football, baseball and tennis also allow kids to stay fit. Many busy parents enroll their kids in children’s gyms. While some provide aerobics classes and child size fitness equipment like treadmills, others offer active playtime and gymnastic style classes. Nintendo Wii, Wii Fit and Gamercize get kids off of the couch and on their feet.
Make sure to keep current on all well child visits and don’t be afraid to voice any concerns you may have about your child’s weight.
Reference:
Source: www.who.int/en
Common Habits of Overweight Kids
Here are seven typical habits of overweight children:
- Never exercise ~ try to get the children to play 1-2 hours 2-3 times per week.
- Eating out more than 2 times per week~ restaurant portions are often huge and cooked with lots of oil. If children eat out, make sure to take at least half home!
- Always say 'yes' to seconds ~ Don’t encourage saying 'yes' to a request for a second portion until you wait about 20 minutes to decide if they are full enough from the first helping.
- Avoid Light Activity ~ make an effort to encourage children to take the stairs, get outside and walk.
- Always say 'yes' to sweets ~ when children crave something sweet, suggest fruit or at least only a little bit of candy, but don't encourage eating dessert just because it's there.
- Eating without feeling hungry ~children often eat to satisfy emotional needs, so find other ways to brighten their mood besides food.
- Skipping meals ~ skipping meals can lead to overeating later in the day so be sure that they eat several small meals throughout the day.
Consequences of Childhood Obesity
Childhood overweight is associated with various health-related consequences. Overweight children and adolescents may experience immediate health consequences and may be at risk for weight-related health problems in adulthood.
Psychosocial Risks
Some consequences of childhood and adolescent overweight are psychosocial. Overweight children and adolescents are targets of early and systematic social discrimination.39 the psychological stress of social stigmatization can cause low self-esteem which, in turn, can hinder academic and social functioning, and persist into adulthood.
Cardiovascular Disease Risks
Overweight children and teens have been found to have risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD), including high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, and abnormal glucose tolerance.39 in a population-based sample of 5- to 17-year-olds, almost 60% of overweight children had at least one CVD risk factor while 25 percent of overweight children had two or more CVD risk factors.
Additional Health Risks
Less common health conditions associated with increased weight include asthma, hepatic steatosis, and sleep apnea and Type 2 diabetes.
Asthma is a disease of the lungs in which the airways become blocked or narrowed causing breathing difficulty. Studies have identified an association between childhood overweight and asthma.
Hepatic steatosis is the fatty degeneration of the liver caused by a high concentration of liver enzymes. Weight reduction causes liver enzymes to normalize.
Sleep apnea is a less common complication of overweight for children and adolescents. Sleep apnea is a sleep-associated breathing disorder defined as the cessation of breathing during sleep that lasts for at least 10 seconds. Sleep apnea is characterized by loud snoring and labored breathing. During sleep apnea, oxygen levels in the blood can fall dramatically. One study estimated that sleep apnea occurs in about 7% of overweight children.
Type 2 diabetes is increasingly being reported among children and adolescents who are overweight. While diabetes and glucose intolerance, a precursor of diabetes, are common health effects of adult obesity, only in recent years has Type 2 diabetes begun to emerge as a health-related problem among children and adolescents. Onset of diabetes in children and adolescents can result in advanced complications such as CVD and kidney failure.
Defining Obesity in Children & Adolescents
Do you know that 5% - 25% of children and teenagers in the United States are obese?
(Dietz, 1983).
As with adults, the prevalence of obesity in the young varies by ethnic group:
It is estimated that 5-7 percent of White and Black children are obese,
while 12 percent of Hispanic boys and 19 percent of Hispanic girls are obese
(Office of Maternal and Child Health, 1989).
Some data indicates that obesity among children is on the rise.
The second National Children and Youth Fitness Study found 6-9 year olds to have thicker skinfolds than their counterparts in the 1960s.
(Ross & Pate, 1987).
During the same period, others documented a 54% increase in the prevalence of obesity among 6-11 year olds
(Gortmaker, Dietz, Sobol, & Wehler, 1987).
Obesity is known as an excessive accumulation of body fat.
Obesity is present when total body weight is more than 25% fat in boys and more than 32% fat in girls
(Lohman, 1987).
Although childhood obesity is often defined as a weight-for-height in excess of 120% of the ideal, skinfold measures are more accurate determinants of fatness
(Dietz, 1983; Lohman, 1987).
A trained technician may obtain skinfold measures relatively easily in either a school or clinical setting. The triceps alone, triceps and subscapular, triceps and calf, and calf alone have been used with children and adolescents.
When the triceps and calf are used, a sum of skinfolds of 10-25mm is considered optimal for boys, and 16-30mm is optimal for girls
(Lohman, 1987).
Prevention of Childhood Obesity
Treatment is an unnecessary option when you could prevent child obesity.
Prevention focuses basically on parent education.
In infancy, parent education should center on:
- breastfeeding,
- recognition of signals of satiety, and
- delayed introduction of solid foods.
In early childhood, education should include:
- proper nutrition,
- selection of low-fat snacks,
- good eating habits (good balance; vegetables-fruit-proteins)
- good exercise/activity habits, and
- monitoring of television viewing.
In cases where preventive measures cannot totally overcome the influence of hereditary factors,
parent should focus on building self-esteem and address psychological issues.
Teens Lose Weight before it’s too Late !
Health issues arising from obesity is already known to vast majority of people. Unfortunately, due to changes is the phase of the modern day lifestyle, statistics show that 15 % of children aging 6 to 19 years of age are overweight (children and teens). What caused the change compared to the last generation? It is hard to determine the real culprit behind child obesity today.
More synthetic diets and fast living contributed a lot in the degradation of quality eating habits of children. Harsh economic conditions push women to enter in the working world. They are no longer fully in charge of the diet of the family unlike in the 60’s. Actually this has nothing to do with a woman preparing the meal, but it is all about how much a mother would put extra effort in keeping the health of the family at best.
Children today live a sedentary lifestyle facing the TV, computer and video games without the guiding busy parents. A busy family with no time to do domestic task would let money feed their stomach. There is enough money to spend for the services of restaurants that pay no special concern other than getting their menus consumed.
The way of making recipes tasty are either achieved by adding more oil and other harsh additives, which are not supposedly a big part of the daily diet. The influx of easy meals available around every corner are either fried or dredged with rich dressings. There is no more time to give it a second look.
With the situation, there is no doubt the picture of obese teens marks the proof of the reality. Before it’s too late, something has to be done. In close to impossible situations, weight loss programs specifically for teens have to be sought.
It starts by a comprehensive visit to a professional who will determine the factors affecting the teen’s weight problem. It will be easy for a doctor to diagnose how much weight has to be shed off by doing calculations of the mass body index ration.
Actually anybody who has an understanding of this can easily determine his or her weight versus height. This has nothing to do whether you only appear thin or fat by other’s opinion, the doctor will make sure to know how long the program has to be followed. The major ailments accompanying obesity will be given priority like rise and fall of blood sugar, blood pressure, heart condition and blood circulation.
Weight loss program for teen will also deal with the psychological aspects on how the teen can cope with its process. In this case, families are encouraged not to inflict discriminating attitude towards the plight of an obese teen. After all, it’s partly the family’s concern and lifestyle, which contributed to the weight problem itself.
A program has to be followed to develop the habit of eating properly that goes along with healthy activities and daily routines. There has to be exercise and movements instead of continuous confinement at home during non-school days.
Formal and expensive weight loss program for teen may be an option for a family, but it may not be needed if the child’s excess weight is manageable. Well-informed families can take do their own way of diet program approved and consulted to a doctor.
Reference:
Source: http://your-knowledge-portal.com/blog/?p=13, october 25th, 2008
The Problem of Obesity
Obese infants do not always become obese children, and obese children do not always become obese adults. However, the occurrence of obesity increases with age among both males and females (Lohman, 1987), and there is a greater.
Chance that obesity beginning even in early childhood will continue through the life span (Epstein, Wing, Koeske, & Valoski, 1987).
Obesity presents several problems for the child. In addition to elevating the risk of obesity in adulthood, childhood obesity is the leading cause of pediatric hypertension, and is associated with Type II diabetes mellitus, increases the risk of coronary heart disease, increases stress on the weight-bearing joints, lowers self-esteem, and affects relationships with peers. Some authorities believe that social and psychological problems are the most important consequences of obesity in children.
Causes of Childhood Obesity
As with adult-onset obesity, childhood obesity has several causes centering around on an imbalance between energy in (calories obtained from food) and energy out (calories expended in the basal metabolic rate and physical activity). Childhood obesity most likely results from an interaction of nutritional, psychological, familial, and physiological factors.
The Family
The risk of children becoming obese is greatest for those who have two obese parents (Dietz, 1983). This may be because of powerful genetic factors or parental modeling of both eating and exercise behaviors, indirectly affecting the child's energy balance. One half of parents of elementary school children never exercise vigorously (Ross & Pate, 1987).
Low-energy Expenditure
The average American child spends several hours every day watching television; time which in previous years might have been devoted to physical activities. Obesity is greater among children and adolescents who frequently watch television (Dietz & Gortmaker, 1985), not only because little energy is expended while viewing but also because of concurrent consumption of high-calorie snacks. Only about one-third of elementary children have daily physical education, and less than one-fifth have extracurricular physical activity programs at their schools (Ross & Pate, 1987).
Heredity
Not all children who eat unhealthy foods, watch several hours of television every day, and are normally inactive develop obesity, the search continues for alternative causes. Heredity has recently been shown to influence fatness, regional fat distribution, and response to overfeeding (Bouchard et al., 1990).
In addition, infants born to overweight mothers have been found to be less active and to gain more weight by age three months when compared with infants of normal weight mothers, suggesting a possible inborn drive to conserve energy (Roberts, Savage, Coward, Chew, & Lucas, 1988).
Treatment of Childhood Obesity
According to Eric Digest, obesity treatment programs for children and adolescents rarely have weight loss as a goal. Rather, the aim is to slow or halt weight gain so the child will grow into his or her body weight over a period of months to years. Dietz (1983) estimates that for every 20 percent excess of ideal body weight, the child will need one and one-half years of weight maintenance to attain ideal body weight.
He also mentions that early and appropriate intervention is particularly valuable. There is considerable evidence that childhood eating and exercise habits are more easily modified than adult habits (Wolf, Cohen, Rosenfeld, 1985). Three forms of intervention include:
Physical Activity
Eric continues to say that adopting a formal exercise program, or simply becoming more active, is valuable to burn fat, increase energy expenditure, and maintain lost weight. Most studies of children have not shown exercise to be a successful strategy for weight loss unless coupled with another intervention, such as nutrition education or behavior modification (Wolf et al., 1985).
However, exercise has additional health benefits. Even when children's body weight and fatness did not change following 50 minutes of aerobic exercise three times per week, blood lipid profiles and blood pressure did improve (Becque, Katch, Rocchini, Marks, & Moorehead, 1988).
Diet Management
Fasting or extreme caloric restriction is not advisable for children. Not only is this approach psychologically stressful, but it may adversely affect growth and the child's perception of "normal" eating.
Balanced diets with moderate caloric restriction, especially reduced dietary fat, have been used successfully in treating obesity (Dietz, 1983). Nutrition education may be necessary. Diet management coupled with exercise is an effective treatment for childhood obesity (Wolf et al., 1985).
Behavior Modification
He continues to say that many behavioral strategies used with adults have been successfully applied to children and adolescents: self-monitoring and recording food intake and physical activity, slowing the rate of eating, limiting the time and place of eating, and using rewards and incentives for desirable behaviors.
Particularly effective are behaviorally based treatments that include parents (Epstein et al., 1987). Graves, Meyers, and Clark (1988) used problem-solving exercises in a parent-child behavioral program and found children in the problem-solving group, but not those in the behavioral treatment-only group, significantly reduced percent overweight and maintained reduced weight for six months. Problem-solving training involved identifying possible weight-control problems and, as a group, discussing solutions.
Reference:
Source: www.kidsource.com, posted on 1990
Author: Eric Digest