Childhood Obesity Observation Paper

1878 Words8 Pages

Situation In the US, children obesity is a serious problem. Compared to the past years, the percentage of children obesity among who are six to eleven year old increased to nearly 18% in 2012 and for adolescents who are twelve to nineteen years old, the percentage increased to 21% due to various factors that cause children obesity (Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2015b). Background According to Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) (2015), obesity is defined as a condition that is related to having an excess body fat. Although the obesity can be measured in many ways, most preferred and common method is to use the Body Mass Index (BMI) (OAC, 2015). Most of the time, people with BMI of 30 or over are considered to be obese (OAC, …show more content…

Nowadays, most children are sedentary and do not spend a lot of time outside. It was found that 75% of children spend their time in front of television or being inactive, whereas they only spend about 12 minutes each day doing dynamic physical activities (Ebbeling et al., 2002). The researchers pointed out in the study that the fact that the physical education (PE) has been eliminated from some school districts due to people thinking it is less significant compared to other academic subjects contributed to childhood obesity since children do not get to move their bodies as much as before (Ebbeling et al., 2002). For those schools that still have PE class, one of the barriers is to have lack of equipment for every student (Ebbeling et al., 2002). As a staff at children weight management center, I highly recommend all the schools to add PE back to their curriculums for students to exercise. In that way, children and adolescents do not have to spend extra time exercising out of class or during their spare times since they would fulfill their requirements already by attending the class. In addition, it is vital for schools to get support for some equipment so that every student has equal chance of using the tools and equipment available to them. By providing the environment that children can easily exercise, I strongly believe that the percentage of children being obese will likely to