What Are The Causes Of Obesity?


by Eric Hartwell - Date: 2007-02-18 - Word Count: 499 Share This!

Food: Compared to the 1970s, there has been a significant rise in the amount of children who get their principle daily food intake away from home. For children between the ages of twelve and nineteen, there has been a major increase in the daily total energy intake. This daily total energy intake seems to stem exclusively from high calorie snack food. What's more, fewer and fewer children are eating breakfast. This seems especially true for the children of working mothers. There has also been an increase in the average serving portions of food since the late 1970s.

That increase has been especially prevalent in soft drinks and salty snack food. Other studies have established that children of today no longer stick to the recommended servings featured in the food pyramid of the USDA. In terms of beverages, today's kids are also making unhealthy choices. Only about a fifth of the children in the United States consume the daily recommended amount of five or more servings of vegetables and fruits. And at that, half of the time, fried potatoes are counted as a vegetable! In the mid-90s, it was recorded that young men and women only consumed 12-30% of the recommended intakes of dairy on a daily basis, and only 14-18% of the recommended intake for fruit.

The amount of carbonated soft drinks that are consumed by children and young adults increased dramatically throughout the course of the previous decade. Nearly half the adolescent population of the United States consumes more than three cans of soda pop a day. Kids as young as seven months old are now drinking cola products. Indeed, whereas milk used to be the beverage of choice for young kids, now it's those sweetened carbonated beverages. Milk consumption in the 1990s decreased nearly forty percent from the average for adolescents in the late 1970s. That means that children today drink twice as much soda pop as they do milk!

Physical Inactivity: One of the sad facts of our time is that young people have fewer and fewer chances to be physically active. In elementary and primary schools, quite often there is a lack of space and equipment for serious physical education, not to mention fewer and fewer teachers with specialized training in this area. Children spent the vast majority of their time at school sitting down behind a desk. The vast majority of six to eight year old in the United Kingdom are allowed only thirty minutes of regulated physical education in their weekly school curriculums! The game fields and playgrounds are being sold off or abandoned. At home, children are discouraged from playing outside due to their parents' concerns with safety.

Genetics and Heredity: Children whose parents are obese have a much greater chance of becoming obese themselves. Perhaps this has to do with genetic factors, but more often than not, it has to do with the family's sedentary lifestyle and eating habits. If parents do not take proper care of themselves, then their children can be born obese.


Related Tags: obesity, diet, dieting, lose weight, overweight, fat, child obesity, teen obesity, teenager obesity

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