Childhood Obesity Counseling Moncks Corner SC

How can parents halt the creeping epidemic that threatens our kids’ futures? The solution: Change the environment so they can move more and eat well.

In our push-button, remote-control, car-oriented culture—where pizza makes house calls and kids between the ages of 2 and 17 spend more than three years of their waking lives watching TV— we’ve created the fattest generation in history.

Waistlines are widening in people of all ages, but “our children, in particular, are gaining weight to a dangerous degree and at an alarming rate,” warns the Institute of Medicine of Washington, DC, in a new action plan (“Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance”) commissioned by Congress to address this growing public health threat. In just 30 years, the prevalence of childhood obesity has soared, with nearly one in three American kids now tipping the scales past healthy weight.

Once dismissed as harmless “baby fat,” childhood obesity is increasingly recognized as a serious health threat that can lead to numerous physical ailments such as type 2 diabetes. In fact, one-fourth of obese kids ages 5 to 10 already have at least two components of what is called metabolic syndrome, a cluster of health problems (including insulin resistance, high blood pressure and high cholesterol) that increases the risk of coronary heart disease and diabetes. Overweight kids also are more likely to be ostracized and bullied—or to bully others.

The grim reality is that obesity exerts a life-shortening effect, which threatens to reverse the steady rise in life expectancy observed in the modern era, contends a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Today’s children are on track to be the first generation in U.S. history to live less healthy, and even shorter, lives than their parents.

How did we get this way? Increasingly, experts point to our “obesogenic” environment, which encourages people to eat too much and move too little.

“We live in a world where the energy demands of daily living are at a historic low and the availability of high-calorie, easily obtainable, inexpensive food is at a historic high,” notes Harold Kohl, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “We’ve created the ‘perfect storm’ for obesity—particularly for children.”

Numerous societal changes have dramatically reduced the amount of energy children burn, while expanding the number of calories they consume. Budget-crunched schools have cut back or eliminated physical education classes—and sometimes even recess. Working parents concerned about safety would rather their kids play video games or watch TV indoors than run around outside. Computers have revolutionized the classroom, entertainment, shopping and communication. Fast food, in “super size” portions, is everywhere—even in some schools—as are vending machines stocked with sodas and chips.

“Our willpower hasn’t changed” in just 30 short years, notes Yale University obesity expe...

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