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Childhood Obesity Across America

Brittany D. Leatham
University of Idaho

Health and Safety 450

Critical Health Issues
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Childhood Obesity across America

Childhood obesity is relevant in today’s society because it is such a growing health issue
amongst American children. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
approximately 17% of American children are obese. By beginning with changing behaviors and
lifestyle choices of children, we can better hope to solve this epidemic and provide better futures
for our youth. Primary prevention strategies are so important with children because they are the
best place to begin to start. If you can build a habit at an early age, a child is more likely to
continue that throughout their lives. Secondary and tertiary prevention strategies help keep them
on the right track and also help children who are already at the obese state. By educating,
researching and program development, we can begin to tackle the issue of childhood obesity in
American children.
Being in my junior year of my Exercise Science and Health major, I have heard the same
thing every semester in every major-specific class I have taken; eat well and get the
recommended physical activity. That is the obvious answer when it comes to problem solving on
this issue. The real results will come once you figure a way to implement this behavior into the
population. Program development and education is the best way to get results. Children don’t
know to exercise unless otherwise advised by society, teachers, parents or any other figures they
look to for behavior establishment. When focusing on children, schools hold so much importance
on the issue and need to be the main focus while trying to combat childhood obesity.
Physical education classes during grade school play a very large role in a child’s health.
By requiring children to participate in a one hour physical education class every day, we are
helping children get the recommended physical activity during the school week. Doing away
with this requirement will essentially set children up for failure. One problem stated in our text is
whether students feel embarrassed to participate in physical activity during school or if they are
being bullied (McKenzie, Pinger, Kotecki, 2012). Obviously we cannot force children to partake
in any activity but with qualified and knowledgeable teachers, we can provide children with the
resources and information required to succeed. Also by providing educated counselors to help
students change their attitudes, behaviors and feelings on the subject of exercise, we can help
students work through any problems or issues they are facing. If they are able to participate in
physical activity in a school setting, that can help them build confidence and interest in
exercising outside of school as well which is just as important as physical activity in school.
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Nutrition in schools plays a major role as well. If you can regulate one meal that each
child has each day, that can help put them on the right track in getting the nutrients that are
needed. School lunch programs need to be able to provide students with options to ensure that
they are well fed and ready to learn for the remainder of the day, but those options also need to
be of high nutritional value. This is a huge issue in the school systems today which mostly boil
down to the problems of lack of funding. Funding for school lunch programs and even for those
that allow children to come to school early for breakfast for the students who come from low-
income households who do not have access to healthy breakfasts.
One small act that can greatly influence a child’s nutritional health is providing them with
a snack to go home with. I know that many children go home and immediately go for an “after-
school snack”. Snacks are just as important in nutritional development as meals are. Growing up,
my brother and I would have an after school snack almost every single day. If you send children
home with a healthy snack, that can help them avoid snacking on whatever potential junk food is
in the house. It also can provide them with energy to go out and participate in physical activity
after class.
Healthy People 2020 outlines the amount of children ages 6-11 who are obese and
provides information to try to reduce that. The baseline of this objective is that 17.4% were obese
in 2005-2008. The target is to reduce that to 15.7% by 2020 by a ten percent improvement
method. By focusing on children ages 6-11, that allows us to focus on grade school children. It is
important to focus on that age group because we as humans develop so much during these years.
This age group is very at risk because our habits and ideologies can be heavily influenced at this
age. Healthy People 2020 also evaluates children at the ages of 2-5 years old, but obesity rates
among those ages is significantly lower. Obesity rates in adolescence ages 12-19 are actually
significantly higher than among those ages 6-11. These statistics should show how important it is
to solve the problem as students are younger to avoid future issues.
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This table represents the growth of childhood obesity from 1988-2012. This graph was
found on the Healthy People 2020 website

Another major problem in the battle of childhood obesity is that parents are not
knowledgeable on what steps they can take to ensure the health of their child. Educating parents
is the first step that needs to be taken when tackling childhood obesity. By ensuring that parents
are aware of the physical activity levels that their children should be reaching as well as the
nutritional state they should be in, parents can strive to reach those goals. They simply need the
correct information to provide parents and guardians. A major set-back in this “answer” to the
problem is even if the parents know exactly what to do to ensure their child’s health, they do not
always have the resources to provide for their children. Some parents do not have the money to
provide their children with healthy meals while others could live in communities that make it
impossible to go outside and be active due to violence or environmental issues.
One government program that is introduced in Community Health that has been set in
place to help combat that at an early age is the program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
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The WIC program, as stated on the uds.gov website, “provides Federal grants to States for
supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant,
breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age
five who are found to be at nutritional risk.” This program includes primary prevention strategies
by providing women with the education before their children are born to start them off healthy or
before their children reach an age where they are prone to overeating and poor nutrition. This
program also gives information needed to provide their children with the correct nutrients and
can help point them in the direction of available resources. Screenings and advice by health care
professionals can stop the issue of childhood obesity and poor nutrition. This can help build a
nutritional foundation for children up to the age of five that could potentially set them up for
further development. The WIC program is so important because of all individuals enrolled in the
program, almost 50% are children.

This graph
represents the
individuals enrolled
in the WIC
program. It is in
Community Health
on page 207.

Another program introduced in the book is Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program. As
stated in Community Health, it “has an ambitious national goal of solving the challenge of
childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a
healthy weight.” That statement is a perfect explanation of how it is a primary prevention
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strategy by beginning with children that are born today. The program asks that health care
providers talk to their patients about the benefits of breastfeeding and how important it is to
introduce healthy foods to children early on. In working with health care providers, the campaign
provides a “prescription for healthy living” that can be distributed to the patients. This includes
habits and goals for not just physical health but also nutritional health. It also works with
children on a secondary level because it asks health care providers to incorporate screening of
Body Mass Index (BMI) in their standard care. On a tertiary scale, the “Let’s Move” campaign
works with children of all ages to get them active. If a child is already at an overweight or obese
state, “Let’s Move” will help get them on the right track in trying to better their future through
healthy living behaviors and habits.
Specifying this program to a population of children ages 6-11 can be the most affective
and possibly the easiest to incorporate in. Schools across the nation can look to the “Let’s Move”
program by utilizing the education resources provided by the program and educate the parents of
the student right when they become enrolled in the schools. By including parents in the education
of healthy eating and active lifestyles when their child enrolls in kindergarten, that can help keep
them involved in later years as well. Parents of children at 10 or 11 years of age might be harder
to convince considering it is a new program that is being introduced to them and their children,
but it is never too later to educate individuals if it means a potentially better future for those
children.
In the Let’s Move program, Michelle Obama tries to incorporate outside resources to try
to help further this program and reach children in different aspects. Explained in the article
called, “Let’s Move! Can it Make Kids Healthier?” published by the Los Angeles Times,
Michelle Obama reaches out to Wal-Mart for help in furthering the goals of Let’s Move. In
January, Wal-Mart agreed to start labeling healthy options more clearly in hopes that families
will start consuming these products and that children will become more drawn to them. While it
is a small step, any step in the right direction can impact the future of our children. This article
shows the positive aspects of the Let’s Move program in working with other resources.
While researching childhood obesity, I came across a very inspiring article recently
published about a program called Building Our Kid’s Success (BOKS). BOKS is a program that
was developed by certified trainers and health care professionals with a goal to decrease body fat
percentages and increase lean weight gain in elementary students by providing them with
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physical activity opportunities. The program is a before-school program held three times a week.
The sessions last for 50 minutes and provide students with individual body weight exercises,
stretching techniques and group activities. This program has shown to have a positive impact on
body composition by helping decrease body fat percentage, increase lean weight gain, increase
aerobic exercise participation and also help children build the confidence to exercise. By doing
so, we can get children on the right tract in becoming healthier individuals and building a healthy
future.
This semester I am enrolled in a movement science class called Leadership, Pedagogy
and Program Planning for Healthy Active Lifestyles (MVSC 429) also taught by Ms. Helen
Brown. In that class, I am working with peers, UI faculty members and faculty at the Moscow
Middle School to help students get more physical activity outside of the physical education
classes they’re enrolled in by using the technology of pedometers. The goal of the project is to
collect data during the fall on the level of each student’s physical activity and compare it to their
activity in the spring to determine whether the pedometers influenced the data or not. Our agency
advisor, Jessica Shawley, has reviewed previous studies similar to what she is conducting while
coordinating her research. This is an example of applying practices and strategies considering
Ms. Shawley is replicating what she already knows to be successful. Other schools across the
nation could try to implement studies similar to this to try to get their students to participate in
moderate to vigorous activity. My involvement in this project gives me credibility on this issue
and has furthered my interest in childhood obesity as well as their physical activity habits.
Obviously, a lot needs to change in order to defeat the childhood obesity epidemic. In my
opinion, the biggest obstacle that needs to be conquered, and possibly the most difficult, is
America’s mentality on exercise, healthy eating and the weight of our population. The saying
goes “the apple does not fall far from the tree”. In this case, this saying applies to how easy it is
for children to copy and develop the habits that their parents possess. If a parent is eating an
unhealthy meal of a hamburger, French fries and a large soft drink, the children are going to
desire that just because that is what their parents have. Parents are not going to feed themselves
those unhealthy meals but then prepare a healthy, nutritional meal for their children. Even if they
do, the children would still prefer the unhealthy meal just because it is so easy for them to want
to copy their parents. As a child, my parents drank a lot of diet coke. I have not ever liked the
taste of the drink, even when I was younger, but because my parents were drinking it, I would
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always sneak sips or ask for a drink. They would rarely let me have any because they knew that
children should not consume diet soft drinks, but it would have been much healthier for them to
put down the drink as well. If we can get parents to exercise along with their children and
incorporate healthy eating into the family structure, we can really influence American children.
In conclusion, childhood obesity is an epidemic that requires so much research and
behavior change that needs to be implemented to today’s society. Some of the most important
areas required for improvement are education on the subject and developed programs that help
implement these changes. Schools need to be greatly focused on because that is one of the only
ways that we, as a society, can regulate and set restrictions for our children. Something also very
important to keep in mind on the subject of childhood obesity is that it is never too late to make a
change. One thing that I will continue to research and still wonder about it how the future of our
health care system will influence our youth and what funding will be set aside solely for
overweight and obese children, specifically in the ages of 6-11 years old.
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References

Childhood Obesity Facts. (2015, June 19). Retrieved October 27, 2015.

Let's Move. (n.d.). Retrieved October 23, 2015, from http://www.letsmove.gov/prescribe-

activity-and-healthy-habits

McKenzie, J., Pinger, R., & Kotecki, J. (2012). An Introduction to Community Health (Seventh
ed.). Sudbury, Massachusets: Jones and Bartlett.

Nutrition and Weight Status. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2015, from
http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/nutrition-and-weight-
status/objectives

Walsh, O. (2015, October 22). ACE(R) STUDY EXAMINES EFFECTS OF BOKS BEFORE-
SCHOOL PHYSICAL ACTIVITY PROGRAM. Retrieved October 24, 2015.

Women, Infants and Children (WIC). (2015, February 3). Retrieved October 27, 2015.