Child obesity has always been a major issue in the United States, but why is it so serious? What is the cause of this? I believe that technology and the advancements made to it is the main cause. It is common for kids these days to own a cell phone, have a TV in their room, a computer and a video game console. It is rare now for kids to want to go out to the park and maybe play basketball or go do something athletic. Before the advancement of modern technology, parents enjoyed watching their kids play outside, enjoy the outdoors, or even climb a tree. However, in our current day and time, our kids are more concerned about when their TV program is going to come on. Technology and Obesity go hand in hand and I will be explaining why in this paper. I will begin by explaining what the other side of the story is. Most people believe that the main cause of child obesity is the foods we feed them. According to CBS(1), they believe that obesity is connected to fast foods. Polls that they took showed that approximately one-third of U.S. children aged between 4-19 eat fast food every day. This study was conducted on 6,212 kids. However, this would not be a problem if most of these kids didn’t go home and sit in front of their TV sets for hours at a time. According to csun.edu, a 65-year old person would have spend 9 years of their lives watching TV. This breaks down to 2 months of nonstop TV-watching for 1 year or 28 hours a week. That is more than 4 hours of their day spent watching TV(2). That is just for adults. The average amount of time a teenager going to high school spends watching TV is a minimum of 103 hours of TV a single month(3). That is not even counting the amount of time spend online or even playing video games. An average teenager spends approximately four hours online surfing the web, on youtube, viewing porn, on myspace or Facebook, etc(4). That’s roughly 31 hours spend online on top of the amount of time spend watching TV.
Child obesity has always been a major issue in the United States, but why is it so serious? What is the cause of this? I believe that technology and the advancements made to it is the main cause. It is common for kids these days to own a cell phone, have a TV in their room, a computer and a video game console. It is rare now for kids to want to go out to the park and maybe play basketball or go do something athletic. Before the advancement of modern technology, parents enjoyed watching their kids play outside, enjoy the outdoors, or even climb a tree. However, in our current day and time, our kids are more concerned about when their TV program is going to come on. Technology and Obesity go hand in hand and I will be explaining why in this paper. I will begin by explaining what the other side of the story is. Most people believe that the main cause of child obesity is the foods we feed them. According to CBS(1), they believe that obesity is connected to fast foods. Polls that they took showed that approximately one-third of U.S. children aged between 4-19 eat fast food every day. This study was conducted on 6,212 kids. However, this would not be a problem if most of these kids didn’t go home and sit in front of their TV sets for hours at a time. According to csun.edu, a 65-year old person would have spend 9 years of their lives watching TV. This breaks down to 2 months of nonstop TV-watching for 1 year or 28 hours a week. That is more than 4 hours of their day spent watching TV(2). That is just for adults. The average amount of time a teenager going to high school spends watching TV is a minimum of 103 hours of TV a single month(3). That is not even counting the amount of time spend online or even playing video games. An average teenager spends approximately four hours online surfing the web, on youtube, viewing porn, on myspace or Facebook, etc(4). That’s roughly 31 hours spend online on top of the amount of time spend watching TV.