Child Obesity

Child Obesity

Jennifer Tharp

490

08/13/2012

Jennifer N. Johnson

Child Obesity

Demographics are any sized area’s population details. This includes details such as the population density, education level, health, economic status, religious affiliations and many more aspects of a population area. Also included are areas such as gender age income, home ownership, race, disability, and employment status in the area in question. In short, demographics are any specific piece of information about a group of people that can be tracked and used in government, marketing, opinion research, and health care to determine who is at risk for specific health problems.

The way that this information is used can find if a health problem can better be prevented by changing some of these demographics. In cases such as childhood obesity, all it takes to change the numbers affected by this is to educate, change lunches offered at schools, or sometimes food banks with healthier foods for at home are needed. Other then the food that is being eaten, other factors to help cause this is the amount of physical activity the children have each day. Over the last 30 years childhood obesity has increased drastically from between 5 and 6.5% in 1980 to 18.1 to 19.6% in 2008 [ (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, UK) ] and these numbers are still rising. One of the biggest results of this is the higher health care cost involved from treating these children for many other illnesses that come with being obese. Children who are obese have a list of health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, bone and joint problems, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. [ (Mayo Clinic Staff, 1998-2012) ] Stadies have shown that close to 70% of children between the ages of 5 and 17 had already developed s form of cardiovascular disease. [ (Mayo Clinic Staff, 1998-2012) ] These diseases are very costly to control and hurt the whole population in time with the cost. By getting childhood...