What are the causes of childhood obesity

Childhood obesity has gained a lot of attention in the recent years

especially the 21st century. Although hormonal problems and parental

genetics are a common risk factors that can contribute to childhood

obesity, but more often that it’s caused by the children themselves who

are consuming too many calories and having too little exercise to burn

off of them. Above is the basic deduction, so what are the factors

contribute to the problem?

It’s not difficult to see why childhood obesity has becoming a

growing problem through the lifestyle and environment nowadays which

are popular with fast food, soda, additives, sedentary activities and

technology dominating our societies. Fast food is cheap and widely

available which you can get it anywhere by the roadside nearby your

housing area or through the delivery service which are mostly free of

charge. Parents have less time to plan and prepare healthy meals

because of their busy lifestyle, or due to the budget constraints, which

results in, children are eating more convenience foods that are usually

less healthy than home-cooked meals, such as frozen dinners, salty

snacks and canned pastas that can contribute to unhealthy weight gain.

Other than that, we can see vending machines and convenience stores

everywhere which make it easy to get a quick snack and allow the

children to access to unhealthy foods and sugary drinks.

Children have also become more inactive in recent years, with the

advent of laptops, tablets, handheld video games and other stationary

activities. This causes inadequate physical activity to occur which

results in childhood obesity. In other words, lack of exercise in daily life

cause obesity to happen between childhoods. Not only children, but

people of all ages will tend to gain weight when they are less active.

Exercise helps in burning excessive calories and maintains a healthy

weight and also provides you a good body health, which in turn

improves your body immune system. But the children nowadays would

only like to stay at house playing with their devices or go the cyber cafe

to play games with friends together. Thus, many electronic devices to

encourage children to exercise more are invented now such as PS4, Wii

and others.

In addition to lifestyle and environment, advertising is another

culprit that causes childhood obesity to occur. Nowadays, children

spend more and more time watching television, and fast food chains

often target children in their advertisements. Not only television

advertising, there are a lots of fast foods advertisements around us in

our daily life too. These advertisements can be spread and effect the

cognition of the childhood through the games and social application. For

example, there are always fast foods advertisements pop out in the

screen when you are playing a game and before you start watching the

youtube video, the advertisements will appear and you only can skip it

after 5 seconds of watching it manually. The fast food chains are using

the effect of celebrity too to promote their fast foods. They mostly hired

the famous popularity to promote fast food and also include the fast

foods in cartoon too. Not just this, but children often eat in front of the

TV too, which can take their focus away from their meal and also lead to

excessive or unhealthy snacking. Watching too much television also

contributes to inactivity.

Childhood obesity is a growing problem, and obese children often

become obese adults, unless there is a change in diet and lifestyle.

Children don’t know how to make the best choices for themselves, and

will usually just end up reaching for sweet things or fast food, if given

the chance. Thus, treating obesity in children and setting them up for a

healthy future is the best way forward and parents should start to take

action to overcome this status until it’s too late to regret and change

anything.