childhood obesity

There are numerous problems with the way that we're currently trying to combat childhood obesity. For one, the messages transmitted to children aren't consistent. Kids are receiving totally different messages about what's healthy and what constitutes a good decision from all different sources - schools, community programs, families, and even the media. With all this confusing information, kids don't know what to believe, and never establish an idea of what's a healthy behavior and why said healthy behaviors are important.

 

In addition, chlidhood obesity is caused by genetic, environmental, and behavioral causes, and our current plan of action isn't addressing all of that - it's focusing on purely the behavioral aspect, trying to cause kids to make a change. However, the genetic and environmental influences are so strong that we cannot continue to simply ignore them. Since obesity is typically passed from parent to child, it's important that the parents are also taught to make healthy choices, and since environment has a strong influence of the developing mind of a child, it's important that children be presented with positive healthy ideas everywhere, and not just through a single curriculum designed to affect behavior.

 

Finally, it is important that we recognize that childhood obesity is not an isolated issue. Rather, it is tied in with many other prevalent problems in America. The first is poverty. There's a clear correlation between income level and obesity rates, as food insecurity often leads to eating more of the unhealthy foods that are cheaper, rather than healthy foods which are typically more expensive. As a result, any plan designed to address childhood obesity needs to also address the serious issue of poverty and food insecurity. Second, any plan designed to impact childhood obesity needs to also address the problem of eating disorders. While the two issues may initailly appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum, they are actually closely connected with one another, as obesity can often lead to eating disorders as children try to develop a strategy to lose weight, even if it isn't the healthiest one. Thanks to the media's representation of what is "beautiful," children have a distorted idea that they need to be extremely skinny in order to be pretty, and so as these obese children try to make healthy choices, they end up making unhealthy ones because that is what the media is presenting to them as the "ideal solution."