A recent study found that after tracking heavy youngsters throughout their lives to adulthood, these obese children were twice as likely to die before the age of 55 compared to thinner children. The article, Child Obesity Risks Death at Early Age explains that they were likely to die of self-inflicted injury or illness. Of course the article stated other problems that children endure that could cause them to die at an earlier age such as pre-diabetes or high blood pressure, but obesity ranked among the highest factors. Shocking to me, nearly one in three American children are now considered to be overweight or obese. This is a huge issue because this really hurts the children's chances of living a long life. Nowadays, everyone expects to live past the age of 55, but if childhood obesity continues to increase in our country, the mortality rates are going to increase at a much earlier age. When the study had been completed, it showed that "adults who had the highest body mass index scores as children were 2.3 times as likely to have died early as those with the lowest scores, and those with the highest glucose levels were 73 percent more likely to have died prematurely."
Edward W. Gregg, who is with the diabetes branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that researchers have always known that pre-diabetes has not had good outcomes for adults, but they had never truly seen the link between it and children. This past study was a useful study because there are very few studies about pre-diabetes tracked in youths all the way up to adulthood. What many people have always thought caused earlier deaths in childhood years, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, the study proved them to be insignificant. It found that high blood pressure was a weak predictor of early death and high cholesterol was not really a factor that influenced premature death.
Therefore, Dr. Peter F. Belamarich says, “The message here is that if you take your kid to the doctor and the doctor says, ‘Well, their blood pressure is O.K., their cholesterol is O.K. and their sugar’s O.K..,’ the kid who’s obese still warrants our attention.”
Questions: How do you feel that one in three children in America are overweight or obese? Is it even possible to stop a statistic like this when it is still increasing?
Bibliography
Rabin, Roni Caryn. Child Obesity Risks Death at
Early Age, Study Finds . 10 February 2012. 1 April 2012
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/health/11fat.html>.
I think it is terrifying how all of these children are so obese, there must be something done. I think classes in community centers for young parents about proper eating habits, should help. I think obesity really affects people who cannot afford healthier foods. I think government should also help subsidize fruits, they are much too expensive for many families to purchase, which is such a shame. I think the fact that many of these children die to to self-harm is really upsetting, and I had never heard that before. I think that is partly society's fault, I'm sure most of these children were not obese, and society has decided that skinny is the only way to be, which is unfair for all children to have to live up too. I think obesity is terrifying, but proper eating and proper body weights- not obese or super tiny.
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