Free sample essays about obesity

free research papers on childhood obesity

True medical causes for obesity are rare and easily dismissed as an explanation. Studies show that no more than 10- 30% of obese children have medically legitimate causes for their being overweight. Most overweight children simply eat too much and exercise too little. An important element in this equation is the amount of time children spend watching television. The progressive increase in the number of obese children correlates strongly with the amount of time spent motionless in front of television. Fat parents tend to have fat children. But obesity is like poverty: though it runs in families, it is not necessarily hereditary.

sample essays about obesity

That fat parents have fat children is often as much a function of lifestyle as genes, though scientists disagree on what proportion of the problem is due to heredity and environment. Obesity is an example of a nutritional condition affecting learning and behavior, but probably not through direct effects on the brain as much as through indirect effects on the social environment and self-image. All agree, however, that once obesity occurs it is extraordinarily resistant to change over the long term. The so-called ratchet effect refers to the fact that once weight increases, it is impossible to lower it below the baseline it started from.

childhood obesity essay

Dieting by itself may compound the problem, and it is usually not good for children. Dieting appears to disrupt the body's "set point," or homeostatic mechanism that determines hunger and satiety. But what, then, can one do with a grossly overweight preadolescent if dieting is likely to worsen the problem? One logical solution is to provide a well-balanced diet with the recommended number of calories for the age and body type and try to maintain a constant weight. If children maintain the same weight, they will become thinner as their natural increase in height takes place with growth spurts. This is not dieting in the sense of lowering calorie intake below normal, but limiting intake to normal levels will seem like a diet at first.

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An important way of accomplishing a successful change in food intake is to monitor snack time, since often as much as 20% of the child's calories come from between-meal snacks. If the snacks are nutritionally sound and their calories counted toward the total daily intake of calories, it doesn't matter when they occur. In other words, it is the total quantity and quality of the diet that affects the degree of fat accumulation, not the timing during the day. Many parents keep close control over the foods provided at mealtime but fail to regulate the kind and amount of calories taken at snack times, especially in school.

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Behavior therapists use a variety of techniques of self monitoring, charting, recording, counting the number of bites, slowing the time taken to eat a meal, and so forth, in order to stem the tide of overeating. Eating more slowly results in a faster cessation of hunger urges. Counting and charting the eating rate gives feedback to help learn the proper rate. But these techniques are generally less effective in child obesity than in adult obesity because they require complete cooperation and involvement of the entire family. There is little hope of maintaining a constant weight if other family members feed at the trough in an uncontrolled fashion.

free obesity research papers

Some solutions to childhood obesity are not only silly, but dangerous. The use of adult forms of dieting with young children is an increasing national problem. Misguided parents who are rightly convinced of the health advantages of a thin lifestyle take 2-year-olds to their aerobics classes and restrict the amount of fat in the diet, often giving them skim milk in place of the recommended regular or low-fat milk. The Surgeon General's recent call for lowering the amount of fat in the adult diet gets mistakenly extrapolated to young children. Without appropriate amounts of fat in the diet, a child's nerve cells cannot develop properly.

obesity research paper

It is easy to think of food and behavior as a one-way street. True, food alters the brain. But what the brain becomes—its beliefs, ideas, emotions, and habits—changes how and what children eat. Self-inflicted starvation—deadly anorexia—may ultimately stem from a single, powerful idea—"I am not thin enough." Obesity reflects a sedentary life-style, a lifetime of bad eating habits, and a love of food. Bulimia comes from a love of food passing through the mouth, but a hatred of it thereafter. We cannot underestimate the power of ideas and emotions in determining our nutritional status.

research papers on childhood obesity

Gauge feelings about your looks, control, power, intelligence, strength, happiness. Tally how long during the day you played sedentary games and watched television and how long you ran, swam, biked, skated. Also, check whether you bused or walked to school today. Walking is one of the simplest yet best ways to exercise. Says esteemed pediatrician Dr. Platon Collipp in Childhood Obesity: Physical activities . . . that can be done alone or with a minimum of others should be taught to obese children . . . Walking or hiking would seem to be the best . . . (p. 330)

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Being 16 and 32% fat, you could have billions upon billions of fat cells, having been born with about five or six billion of them, says Joseph Wilkinson in his book Don't Raise Your Child to be a Fat Adult. An adult with an obesity condition could have over 100 billion. 5 Think of fat cells as depots for fat -- storage bins for fat. These depots may increase in size (hypertrophy) or in number (hyperplasia); size increases may trigger number increases as fat-cell size crosses some threshold and obesity becomes pronounced. The fatty sheath that surrounds brain nerve cells, myelin, protects the nerves from "crosstalk," much like the insulation in electrical wiring.

research paper on obesity

Obesity may well be considered in connection with eating habits, although the condition is by no means always merely a matter of toohigh caloric content of food. Glandular conditions are often responsible for overweight. Psychological factors, however, play a large part. Very often a child who needs emotional security overeats as a kind of compensation for his emotional deprivation. Likewise, the overprotected and pampered child may overeat and become obese. In diabetes and allergic conditions, as well as in obesity, locking the cupboard or barricading the icebox are not nearly so effective as getting the child to "help" in maintaining his prescribed diet. In fact, the former procedures are bound to fail.