Childhood Obesity Research Paper

Nate Johnson Conroy, Fall 2009 10/30/09 Childhood Obesity A Big Problem A survey taken by the National Association of Children’s Hospitals in January of 2007 showed that over nine million children ages 6 to 19 in the United States were obese; that comes out to about 16 percent (N.A.C.H. 1). While this is a disturbing statistic in itself, a more problematic statistic is that the number of obese children in the U.S. has triples since 1980 (N.A.C.H. 1)—proof that obesity is a huge problem and will not be going away any time soon. Obesity as a child more often than not leads to obesity as an adult (N.A.C.H. 1), which has lead to 26.1 percent of adults in this country being obese. It is much easier for kids to lose weight than it
“We find that parental models are very consistent with biomedical understandings (reduce fat, reduce sugar, portion control, etc.). Regardless, children’s diets are extremely high in calories overall as well as in high sugar and fat food items,” (Brewis, 1). In this quote “parental models” is a term used to define how parents believe their children should be eating. Compared to what medical studies show to be a healthy diet, they were found to be pretty similar. This is a good example of how parents are seeing less of their kids, as 57 percent of the kids in this study were teenagers and over half of teens today believe that they do not see enough of their parents (Hartvelt, 1). When a kid does not see his/her parent(s), the parents have much less control over what their child can eat. These statistics further backup the notion that it is far more difficult for parents to monitor teenager’s diets than it is to monitor the diets of children younger than that. This is where schooling comes
For comparison, Mississippi only requires physical education at “varying grade levels,” with no requirements in physical education to graduate high school (NCSL, 1). As a result, Mississippi leads the nation with an obesity rate of 32.8 percent (Hitti, 1). As you can see, there is a very strong correlation between high obesity rates and states that do not require physical education in high school. P.E. classes should be kept up in elementary schools but need to be reinforced in a lot of high schools, and there is definitely room for