Childhood Obesity
We all have heard about it, seen it on the news or read about it in the newspapers. You can see evidence of it at your child’s own school.
Children who are obese.
Children who have overweight mothers are more likely to be overweight themselves, now researchers say that Latino children are more prone to being overweight then African American or Caucasian children. These studies were taken over a two year period in low income, urban areas. Out of 2,000 three year old children 44 percent of the Latino preschoolers were obese.
Of course if you are on a fixed income, buying groceries for your household is a problem and fruits, veggies and healthy choices don’t come cheap. I know that I struggle with the weekly food bill and the cost of organic food that I choose to feed my family.
The fact is though, that obese children are at risk for developing type 2 diabetes (which is on the rise for children), cardiovascular disease and high cholesterol. Not to mention that obese children have a 70% chance of being an obese adult.
Not a fun statistic.
We need to fix the programs set to aid poorer families with food and medical costs. We also need to fix the school lunch programs which offer our children chicken nuggets, pizza and soda on a daily basis.
I just don’t know how to start.
What do you think the solution is?
obese children, childhood obesity, parenting, overweight kids
April 11th, 2007 at 8:13 am
[...] April 11th, 2007 by Erinn The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation plans to spend $500 million dollars to help eradicate childhood obesity in the United States. Obesity among children is now an epidemic with 25 million kids under the age of 17 obese. [...]