Child Obesity And The Factors That Lead To Children Being Obese

By Author: Donald Saunders
Total Articles: 84
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With rates for obesity continuing to rise in in the United States it is perhaps not surprising that we are seeing an increasing number of overweight and obese children. But precisely what causes childhood obesity?

The answer is that there is no one cause of childhood obesity and there are many factors that result in obesity in our children.

It is generally the case for example that a child whose parents are overweight or obese will also be overweight and this suggests that there may well be an inherited or genetic element to obesity. But, despite the fact that this is currently being studied, no genetic link has yet been discovered and it is thought much more likely that it is the diet of the family which produce obesity rather than genetics.

In the last few years we have seen a marked change in eating habits with fast food restaurants springing up on every street corner, junk food widely available and our supermarket shelves bulging with so-called 'convenience' foods that are often extremely high in sugar. The days when we sat down to home cooked meals are a thing of the past in the majority of homes and ...
... have been replaced by take-away food or microwave meals. In fact, all too many parents are now choosing to take their children out to eat instead of cooking meals at home not just because it is simpler than cooking a meal but also because it saves on the washing up!

In addition, we have seen a dramatic drop in activity levels amongst many groups of children, fuelled in no small measure by the advent of homecomputers, video games and now the ever present mobile phone. Unsurprisingly, as activity levels have dropped so our children have also lost their normal ability to burn up the calories gained from eating more and more fast food.

Magazine, television, the Internet and other forms of media also play a part as they all but dominate the lives of our kids and junk food, fast food and candy manufacturers are not slow in jumping onto this particular bandwagon and take full advantage of the advertising opportunity which the media provides. A lot of people argue that commercials have done more to fuel the rise in child obesity that almost anything else in the last few years.

There are also clearly a variety of psychological factors at play in the world today and many children today simply eat when they are bored. In addition, they will turn to food whenever they are under stress, angry, anxious or depressed.

Nowadays a great deal of research is being aimed at the causes of child obesity and its treatment and the majority of this research is focused on solving the problem using a combination of diet and exercise once confronted with an obese child. But, with childhood obesity continuing to rise at a frightening rate, perhaps the time has come to tackle the roots of the problem and to stop our children from getting obese in the first place.