Childhood Obesity - Do you have an overweight child? We offer tips to help your child lose weight and get fit!

A study from the Netherlands found that family involvement is a key factor in helping overweight teens and children lose weight.

Hiltje O. Luttikhuis of the University Medical Center in Groningen, the Netherlands, studied whether changes in lifestyle, family involvement, surgery, or drugs were effective in helping young people lose weight.

Family lifestyle interventions that included behavioral therapy and changes in diet and exercise worked better than self-help programs. Teens and children on drug therapy suffered some adverse effects.

"While there is limited quality data to recommend one treatment program over another, this review shows that combined behavioral lifestyle interventions compared to standard care or self-help can produce a significant and clinically meaningful reduction in overweight in children and adolescents," the study's authors wrote in the journal Cochrane Review.

Labels: weight_loss, families, involvement

Posted By: My Overweight Child 3 Comments

Blue Cross and Blue Shield  has developed a program to help doctors in their efforts to treat childhood obesity.  The program was first tested in North Carolina, where one-third of all children are obese or overweight.

The Pediatric Obesity and Diabetes Prevention Pilot Program will be active in ffive states in an effort to help reduce childhood obesity and prevent future cases of diabetes.

The following is from a press release announcing the program:

The toolkit materials display healthy messages from The Good Health Club, a group of animal characters.  The Good Health Club encourages kids to:

• Eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables every day
• Limit screen time to 2 hours or less
• Get at least 1 hour of physical activity
• Limit sweetened drinks to 0

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that overweight adolescents have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight or obese adults.  Obese children or teens are at risk for health problems like heart disease and diabetes – the two leading causes of death in the United States.  The prevalence of obesity among children ages 6 to 11 has more than doubled in the past 20 years from 6.5 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2006.1

 

Labels: health, doctors

Posted By: My Overweight Child 2 Comments

Aaron (not his real name) spent years fighting urges to eat almost continuously. Food was the answer to everything: stress, sorrow, depression and even joy. In his attempt to control himself, he would keep his cabinets free of food. But he would just end up going to a friend’s house to eat.

“A growing number of obesity experts would argue that Aaron had a food addiction, that he had become hooked on the ‘high’ he got from certain foods, especially those loaded in sugar and fat, and that the ‘pleasure centre’ in his brain had been hijacked.” [Source: CTV News]

Assistant psychiatry professor Dr. Valerie Taylor admits that the idea of “food addiction” is still not widely accepted by the medical community. But new studies are adding to the growing collection of evidence affirming food addiction as a real medical condition. Taylor hopes that acknowledgement of the condition will help doctors better treat obese patients who may have food addictions.

Labels: overeating

Posted By: Stefanie Hamilton 1 Comment

According to a controversial report from a group of retired military officers, childhood obesity is a threat to national security because it is so hard to find young people sufficiently fit to serve in the military.

The group calls itself "Mission: Readiness."

"When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice," said retired Navy Rear Adm. James Barnett Jr.

Barnett and others in the group said that the government has to spend tens of millions of dollars a year to train replacements discharged because they are overweight. It is also harder to find recruits since nine million young adults, or almost one in three of those ages 17 and 24 years old, do not meet weight standards for military service.

Mission: Readiness is asking Congress to improve school lunch programs by eliminating junk food and sugary sodas, and by spending more money to serve healthy foods like fruits and vegetables.

"This is the future of the Army we are talking about when we look at the 17 to 24-year-olds," said U.S. Army Recruiting Command Officer Mark Howell. "The sad thing is a lot of them want to join but cannot."
 

Labels: obese teens

Posted By: Stefanie Hamilton 1 Comment

Having college students become mentors for inner-city middle school students helps the younger children develop healthier lifestyles, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics.

• Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine paired 235 African American children.
• The children, ages 11 through 16, were from low-income communities.
• The mentors were African-American college students or recent college graduates.
• The mentors talked to the children about food, took them to restaurants and food stores, and showed them how to remain physically active by hiking, skating and other sports.

By the end of this study, the rate of overweight and obesity among the younger children declined from 38% to 33%.

"We tried to normalize being healthy and taking care of yourself," said author Dr. Maureen Black. "We wanted to make it normal to be healthy and fit."
 

Labels: childhood_obesity, prevention, childhood_health, mentors

Posted By: Aspen/CRC 1 Comment