Childhood Obesity Essay -- Health Care, Diseases

Today, about one in three American kids and teens are overweight or obese virtually triple the rate from 1983. With good reason, childhood fleshiness is now the Number 1 health concern among parents in the United States, topping drug outcry and smoking. If current trends continue, todays kids could be the first generation to live shorter lives than their parents (Clinton, para. 3 2011). Children may not understand the complexities of food intake or obesity but they continue to be affected by the issue. The reality is that if a parent enables their kids to make poor eating choices as children they will struggle as adults to make the right eating choices. Many factors contribute to childhood obesity but the major factors are living sedentary lifestyles along with poor edible and over consumption of plummetty foods. Websters Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English language defines obese as excessively fat corpulent (bulkiness or pretence of body) overweight. According C harles Stuart Platkin, PhD, (2009) the childs Body Mass Index (BMI)-the number calculated from a persons weight and height- provides a reliable indicator of body fatness. A persons body fat percentage is the total weight of the persons fat divided by the persons weight and consists of essential body fat and storage body fat. A childs BMI is calculated to asses there weight to make sure children are healthy at there current status. Based on research from the American eye Association (2011) 23.4 million children ages two to nineteen are overweight and obese. 12.3 million of those children are males and 11.1 million are females.There is no debate about whether childhood obesity is a problem in the United States. The debate should begin with ackno... ...mputer or playing video games (Childhood Obesity, 2011, p. 1) Considering a child is in school for nearly six to seven hours a day and is playing video games or watching TV four to five hours a day there is actually little time left for physical activity that often gets neglected.Obesity often appears with children who consume far more calories than they can burn off. . It would take an averaged surface person, running at a pace of 10 minutes per mile, one hour to burn off all 620 calories consumed in the mighty mcnugget meal at McDonalds. (Natural bodybuilding, 2011)Kids nowadays prefer watching SpongeBob Square Pants or nickelodeons cartoon network verse taking part in outdoor activities. An easy occlusion in avoiding obesity issues among young children is to make time everyday for active activities and limit the amount of time the child sit stationery.