Childhood Obesity

Childhood Obesity

The focus of my project is on childhood obesity and proposals on how to alleviate this growing problem.

The presentation emphasized the need for behavioral change to combat the highly avoidable consequences of obesity and the financial burden of the associated chronic complications as it applies to the healthcare system in the US.

With 2 young children of my own that are mildly overweight and a family history of obesity, this issue is of personal interest to me. My project encourages the assesment of my communitie’s situation to provide initiatives and programs aimed at the numerous affected families with similar concerns and also to awareness of the potential hazards to families that are not aware of the gravity of the situaton.

Obesity is now the second leading preventable cause of death in the USA (Li, Treuth & Wang, 2010). It is estimated that 1 billion people worldwide are overweight with 300,000 million people of these case being obese (Kosti & Panagiotakos, 2006). 22 million children worldwide under the age of 5yrs are severely obese, and 1 in 10 children are overweight (Kosti & Panagiotakos, 2006).

In the European Union, the number of new overweight individuals are expected to rise by 1.3 million per year with 300,000 of these cases qualifying as obese (Kosti & Panagiotakos, 2006). The rising trend of obesity in evident in the USA where the prevalence of obesity in adolescents has increased by about 4-8 percent between 1970 and 1991 (Kosti & Panagiotakos, 2006).

Comparison of obesity between different countries is affected by the variations in criteria defining obesity (Lobstein & Jackson-Leach, 2007). In 2000, the International Obesity Task force (IOTF), defined a set of cutoff points adjusted for age and gender for children 2-18 yrs to assist in cross national comparison of prevalence and trends of obesity (Lobstein & Jackson-Leach, 2007).

In a review of 33 studies conducted in the USA, results...