Children Obesity

Avoid and combat childhood obesity…

Health statistics on children obesity have reached levels that are alarming. The health risks that result from children obesity are not ones you want to be dealing with.

As a parent, you are responsible for your children’s health and must do all you can to avoid putting your children in danger of being overweight or obese.

In terms of children health conditions, it’s amazing how much times have changed. Even though nearly everyone knows that “you are what you eat”, eating healthy at home, and avoiding childhood obesity is still a major challenge facing many homes nowadays.

Modern lifestyle has also given rise to more and more processed foods and read-made meals.

Here are the 3 main causes of children obesity:

1. Lack of Nutrition

One of the main causes of children obesity is the lack of proper nutrition and the right foods in their diets. A lot of their meals contain too much fat, and too little nutrients. This means that some of the essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals they need for their bodies to function properly will be lacking in those meals. When they eat food with too little nutrition, the food doesn’t digest as well as it should.

2. Lack of Exercise

With television and games, kids these days don’t do a lot of exercise. In fact, some of them hardly do any exercise. Is it any wonder there are so many more obese and overweight children now? How would they digest their foods properly when they don’t move around?

3. Over-eating or Over-indulgence in Unhealthy Foods

Another contributory factor to children obesity is the effect of parents allowing their kids to eat as much as they want of unhealthy foods, fast food and junk food in particular. Time is what stops families from cooking healthy, nutritious meals at home. So they instead have over responsibility of their children’s food and health to everybody else but themselves! That is, to breakfast clubs in the morning, lunch and snacks at school, and fast food and take-aways most evenings.

If you are a busy parent who has not had much time to monitor your children’s meals, it is time to change and seriously start taking note of what your children are eating.

Give Kids a Good Quality, Healthy Life

While the hurried lifestyle and the work demands of this age is something we must all live with, it is not enough reason to hand over responsibility of what your children are eating to convenience stores, school meals, and the sweet shops. Your children must be getting enough nutrition from their diets. This is a non-negotiable rule that must be practiced in preparing their meals for them.

The risks and consequences of not looking after your children’s health far outweigh the inconveniences of taking full control of what they are feeding on. Obesity is when a person is carrying too much body fat for their height and sex.

As you must already know, obesity develops from overeating, too much fatty foods, and lack of daily physical activity. Current lifestyle is physically less active than it used to be. This means also that the calories people and their children eat are not getting burnt off as energy, but instead are being stored as fat.

Once a child is obese or overweight, it might be more difficult to lose the excess fat. The child will most likely feel uncomfortable at school. It can affect their thinking and even cause them to have low self-esteem. Being obese will also raise the child’s risk factor of heart disease. So you want to avoid childhood obesity at all costs.

If we do not make wholesome lifestyle changes; making sure our children eat the right foods with proper nutrition, reduce the amount of calorie intake and increase the amount of their physical activity, we are heading further down the barrel of a health epidemic in children obesity.

The information here is for general guidance only.
Talk to your doctor before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.