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What You Can Do To Fight Childhood Obesity

With nearly 33% of children in America considered to be overweight or obese - a rate that has tripled in adolescents and more than doubled in younger children since 1980 - an Obama Administration task force recently established a goal of reducing the childhood obesity rate to just 5% by 2030, less than a generation away.
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Facts About Childhood Obesity

According to C & R's Youth Beat, kids eat at a restaurant 2.5 times a month. In an average 30-day month, there are 150 meal occasions:
- 30 Breakfasts
- 30 Lunches
- 30 Dinners
- 60 Snacks (at twice a day)
If kids are only going to restaurants 2-3 times a month, they account for only 2 percent of all meal occasions.
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President Bill Clinton Honors 179 U.S. Schools

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, founded by the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, today recognized 179 schools that have transformed their campuses into healthier places for students and staff.
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Posts Tagged ‘child obesity’

Schools Introduce a New Plan to Fight Childhood Obesity

Friday, September 10th, 2010

According to an aritcle from www.heraldsun.com, schools are intoducing a new radical plan to fight childhood obesity.

Berwick Primary School students

Schools Introduce Radical Plan to Fight Childhood Obesity

“Victorian primary school students are standing up in class for half an hour a day in a radical plan to beat childhood obesity.

And they’re having ‘activity breaks’ to get them moving between classes.

Students are also set homework tasks such as going for a walk with mum and dad, and are being urged to reduce their time in front of the TV.

The pilot plan, involving 30 grade 3 classes from state schools, gives some students tokens that will restrict their TV viewing. If they go beyond their allocated time, the TV automatically turns off.”

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Editorial: Children's Health and Fitness Habits Begin at Home

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Here is an article from greenbaypressgazette.com about how health and fitness should start at homes, not at McDonald’s. Eating fast-food is not the only cause of childhood obesity: lack of exercise, emotional and environmental factors are causes as well.

According to a Harokopio University study, children are more than 2.4 times likely to be overweight if they have obese parents, which can cause lifelong struggles.

The fight to solve obesity needs to start with parents and communities by choosing healthier meal choices and increase physical activity at home and school. It is ultimately the public and consumers who should decide what their meal options are not CSPI.

kids play 300x194 Editorial: Children's Health and Fitness Habits Begin at Home

Editorial: Children’s health and fitness habits begin at home

An advocacy group’s threat to sue McDonald’s over Happy Meal toys can further the dialogue about childhood obesity, but real change around raising healthy kids needs to start at home.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest recently announced its intent to bring suit against the fast-food behemoth unless McDonald’s stops marketing unhealthy food to children through the inclusion of toys in Happy Meals. In a release, the group “urged McDonald’s to stop undermining parents and deceiving children” with inexpensive toys like those from the latest “Shrek” film.

“While Shrek may appear on packaging for low-fat milk and Apple Dippers,” the group states, “when children or parents order Happy Meals they are given French fries 93 percent of the time, and offered soda first 78 percent of the time.”

Whatever numbers one uses, the bottom line is health and fitness habits need to start at home, not in line at the Golden Arches. It’s no secret that a good deal of fast-food fare is fat- and calorie-laden and nutritionally deficient, and that countless experts point to eating on the go as a major contributing factor to the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic.

But we also know eating out is only one piece of an incredibly complex childhood health puzzle that also includes holistic nutrition, exercise, and emotional and environmental factors. Removing a plastic ogre from your child’s lunch can have at best a marginal impact.

We encourage parents to make smart choices when eating out, including when it comes to consumption of fast food and other nutritionally questionable fare. But we also urge them to take a look at their own behaviors and what’s going on at home in terms of eating and exercise.

Research like a 2004 study from Harokopio University in Athens, Greece, bears out that parents matter when it comes to their children’s health. That study found children with one obese parent were almost twice as likely to be overweight than children of normal-weight parents. Children with two obese parents were 2.4 times more likely to be overweight.

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Study Finds Childhood Obesity Declining by 4 Percent

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Here is an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer written by Don Sapatkin about how a recent study show that childhood obesity has decreased by 4 percent. Gary D. Foster, director of Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research and Education, said the research was conducted to determine if schools could effectively increase healthier food in cafeteria and physical activity, which could control obesity and health risks such as Type 2 diabetes. The study concluded that school health act programs can help solve the obesity epidemic.

Study finds childhood obesity declining by 4 percent

happy kids small1 300x300 Study Finds Childhood Obesity Declining by 4 Percent

Tantalizing evidence that America’s epidemic of childhood obesity might be starting to subside was presented Sunday by researchers who also found that the trend could be speeded up through school programs.

Several recent studies reported that rates of overweight and obese children plateaued after rising rapidly since 1980. But this is the first major study to detect a decline – of 4 percent – and it was in a national sample dominated by low-income blacks and Hispanics, the groups at highest risk.

“These are the kids you expect least to change,” said Gary D. Foster, director of Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research and Education, who chaired the study of 4,603 students in 42 middle schools around the country, including six in Philadelphia. He and others speculated that the decline might be greater in the general population.

Though good news, the finding was not what the researchers were looking for. Their primary goal was to determine whether an intensive, school-based effort to decrease calories and increase physical activity could make a dent in the combined prevalence of children who are overweight and obese, key risk factors for Type 2 diabetes.

In fall 2006, they divided the schools into two groups. The sixth graders in half the schools participated in the program; the other half were controls. When they were reassessed as eighth graders in spring 2009, the rate of overweight and obese students had dropped by nearly the same 4 percent in the schools that got the intervention as in those that did not.

However, the researchers did find notable differences among subgroups and in specific measures. For example, body-mass index scores, average insulin levels and the percentage of students with the largest waists – all risk factors for Type 2 diabetes – were significantly better in the intervention schools. All the effects were even stronger among students who were overweight or obese when they began the program in sixth grade. That group, in fact, had 21 percent lower odds of being obese at the end of eighth grade compared with the controls.

Foster and colleagues presented the findings Sunday at the association’s annual scientific meeting in Orlando. Underscoring their significance, the results were simultaneously published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Type 2 diabetes, until recently seen only in adults, has been increasing steadily in children and teenagers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that one of every three children born in 2000, and one of every two children in high-risk minority groups, will develop diabetes in their lifetimes. People with Type 2 diabetes gradually lose the ability to produce insulin and are at risk of kidney failure, amputations, blindness, heart disease, and stroke.

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About Us

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Hi Readers,

Please let us know what you want to learn more about.  ObesitySolvers is a place for discussion regarding the childhood obesity battle, why we need solutions and why we don’t need more issues about how we choose to eat.  This site will assist in revealing all of the “non-stupid” information surrounding obesity. If you can help solve the obesity battle, please feel free to submit your press releases for review.

Visit www.freetochooseourmeals.com for more details regarding the government’s involvement in regulating what we want to eat. Twitter: @ChooseMeals

Thank you.