I want your thoughts on the Child Obesity problem in the US
acoustic guy
Posts: 3,770
I keep reading how big of a problem this is and I try to beat it by keeping my children as healthy as possible.
Even though I lean toward the far right, and I DONT like big government in our lives I feel something has to be done about this.
Its obvious that most parents are MORONS! And that they either are to stupid to see that what they are doing to the kids is a form of abuse, or that they just simply dont care.
If people wont educate themselves about health and nutrition in this day and age then maybe the Government does need to help.
(NOT TRYING TO BE RACIST) But.....its even worse in minority families from what I have read. (Just writing what I have read). Its worse because many cities like Atlantic City dont even have a Super Market! But the reason for that is a whole nother discussion in itself. I watched a few documentries on the Food in America and its a=scary as fucking hell!!!
All kids eat today are heavy carbs, sugar and salt!!!
Horrible.
Even though I lean toward the far right, and I DONT like big government in our lives I feel something has to be done about this.
Its obvious that most parents are MORONS! And that they either are to stupid to see that what they are doing to the kids is a form of abuse, or that they just simply dont care.
If people wont educate themselves about health and nutrition in this day and age then maybe the Government does need to help.
(NOT TRYING TO BE RACIST) But.....its even worse in minority families from what I have read. (Just writing what I have read). Its worse because many cities like Atlantic City dont even have a Super Market! But the reason for that is a whole nother discussion in itself. I watched a few documentries on the Food in America and its a=scary as fucking hell!!!
All kids eat today are heavy carbs, sugar and salt!!!
Horrible.
Get em a Body Bag Yeeeeeaaaaa!
Sweep the Leg Johnny.
Sweep the Leg Johnny.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
it's related to issues of education, income disparity, poverty, exploitation and the corporatization of government ...
your beef shouldn't be with the size of government - your beef should be with a corrupt and corporatized gov't ...
Good point.
I read about the contracts that many schools have with these huge food companies and how the shit they feed these children is just that....pure garbage.
Sweep the Leg Johnny.
the parents are eating the same shit
You wouldn't put unrefined oil into you car because you know that would lead to performance issues and cause the car to breakdown. I would consider a child to be a 1000x more important then a car, so why be so stupid about what you feed to something that you love and care for. With the internet and Google searches, there is not an excuse except laziness ... or you don't care.
Sorry to pointed, but I feel it's the truth. I could stand to lose 10-15 lbs right now. I know how to do it ... I stop drinking beer in the evening and start packing my lunch each day for work. It's that simple (except for giving up beer
Like most families we do get fast food for lunch every once in a while, and a few months while traveling we stopped at Burger King for lunch. We got our son a kids meal, and it was actually more expensive to get apples in it than fries... that just summed it up for me why poorer kids are more likely to have bad nutrition. Seriously burger king, you are going to charge more for fruit?
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
see my point about education ... how many parents understand nutrition? ... clearly not that many as the obesity rate is skyrocketing ... what is it now? 3 of 4 will be obese by 2020? ... that is staggering ...
it also doesn't help that we are a consumer based society that eats up marketing campaigns like its gold ... and really, what hope does a family of four with low income have? ... they a) send their kids to school where they get crap food b) have little education c) feel like they can only afford to buy crap food at the store and d) have no way of getting out of their situation
the income gap is growing and there are more and more people in this category
often income and education related
and more often than not - stigmatized
most children should have enough metabolic energy to burn off an order of fries and a milkshake
but most children are less active than we were
more technolgy usually means less motion
and as many have said, obesity begins at home
(BRY-
Wendy's will give you mandarine oranges in place of fries in kid's meals or adults
or at least they did five years ago when i still ate meat)
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
SHOW COUNT: (164) 1990's=3, 2000's=53, 2010/20's=108, US=118, CAN=15, Europe=20 ,New Zealand=4, Australia=5
Mexico=1, Colombia=1
That is crazy that they charged more, but that was exactly my point. I would even go as far to say that fast food commercials should someday be treated with the disdain of tobacco as obesity is killing people as well.
yeah
supersize ads should go the way of joe camel ads!!
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
Modern living doesn't help either. I see the kids sitting around like couch potatoes with all their entertainment at their fingertips. As a kid I remember the local park always full of kids kicking a ball around. Our local park is deserted. It seems to be more fun sitting around a shopping centre.
Unless we teach the young and their parents what damage overeating and eating the wrong food does to them the problem will grow... literally! And we definitely need to make them more active.
As for the older generations with an obesity problem I can't help think they are just a lost cause. More sensible nutrition advice would help instead of promoting celebrity fad diets.
Yeah... i actually prefer Wendy's to the other burger fast food joints... you can get these pick 2 meals there and get a salad and chili or something like that instead of the usual burger and fries crap.
It's funny, we have a 3 year old, and having him has made my wife and I eat better... when it was just the two of us, we used to eat worse... more takeout... more pizza... more processed foods, etc because we never really planned meals. Now we usually pack lunches, and actually plan our dinners for the week for the most part. And when we plan, it seems like we make much better choices. We still don't eat the best foods all the time and probably eat bigger portions that we should.
It funny, even when we go out to dinner now, he usually picks better things off of the kids menu... We went to Chili's the other day and where a lot of kids would want chicken fingers and fries, he wanted a quesadilla and pineapples.
I think that when kids grow up learning to eat more healthy foods, and are used to more balanced diets, they grow up much healthier and make better choices.
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
this is interesting
girls that start school earlier are less likely to become obese
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
I would say there was no excuse even before the internet was invented. I mean its not like most cities don't have libraries that will let you borrow books on just about every topic for free.
As far as cost goes, I think that is just a lazy excuse too. I mean yes a happy meal is cheap, but at the same time at most grocery stores I have been to you can buy a 2kg bag of frozen mixed vegtables for under $4. A dozen eggs for about $2.25 and things like chicken, pasta and tuna aren't really that expensive either. And that is in Canada, every time I go to the US food prices in grocery stores are even lower.
knowledge is the key to solving the issue, unfortunately you cannot force people to learn and sacrifice.
I do not buy the too poor to eat well argument. If you are not homeless you can eat foods that are good for you, they may not be the best quality organic fruits and vegetables, but you can still eat well. I was poor as shit for 3 years, the kind of poor where you have to choose what bills you are paying every month, the kind of poor that has no heat in the winter, and in minneapolis that is f'n cold, and I still was able to get good foods to eat. Luckily I grew up knowing what those were so I was able to maximize my dollars with the knowledge I had...
it isn't a rich poor issue, is it easier to eat well if you are rich...absolutely, but it is not exclusive to rich people. And trust me, there are fat kids who are rich, I see them everyday when I coach hockey in a well off area of the twin cities...are there people who are too poor to eat well...yep, but that is a vast minority.
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
1. nutrition should be covered for more than a week in your basic health class. kids should be hammered with nutrition information and healthy eating habits, including healthy vs unhealthy food recognition and they should be taught portion control. everyone knows that a serving size of chicken or beef is 4-3 oz, but the kids aren't taught how big that looks or why portion control is important.
2. use physical education class for physcial education. EDUCATION. it should be a requirement to take PE class of some sort every year of school. in missouri you only have to have 3 semesters over 4 years of high school. it is one thing to have kids running around playing flag football for 50 minutes a day, but archery has no physical demands and they spend over 2 weeks on that. but when they leave PE they have learned nothing about their body, how it works, or things they can do to live a healthy lifestyle. it should encompass nutrition and self care, hygiene, and basic injury care. they can not learn all of these things from mom and dad because most times mom and dad are clueless about these things. i am amazed how in 2010 a kid will sprain an ankle and soak it in hot water and epsom salts. all that does is encourage swelling and can potentially set them back another week in recovery time. poor hygiene spreads things like ringworm and impetigo and even herpes in sports like wrestling, and the kids do not know that either. physical education should consist of more than just playing a game for 3 hours a week.
3. do what this law is doing. diminish unhealthy food choices in schools and encourage healthy ones. most kids eat breakfast and lunch at school these days, which is more than they eat at home. i feel that if the parents can not tell them what to eat, then the school should have a hand in that because the school is responsible for those kids while they are on school property and in class. it is my opinion that the school has a duty to educate the kids on these things and should work to help them become healthier and not allow them to eat the funyuns and mountain dew lunch..
that is just the start. i have others but i am pressed for time....
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Also, I wonder if they still have the rope in PE classes. I imagine that it has gone the way of the dodo due to liability issues, but was anyone else forced to climb a 50' rope to the top of the gymnasium rafters in school?
C'mon, they put a 1 inch thick wrestling mat below the rope. Surely, that would have somehow lessened the compund fractures...
Please Support My Writing Habit By Purchasing A Book:
https://www.createspace.com/3437020
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000663025696
http://earthtremors.blogspot.com/
Anyway, it's almost impossible to hurt yourself when you are a kid. I remember climbing small trees until trunk was small enough that it would bend the tree in half and lower me back to the ground. I climbed a tree a few years back and thought I would have to call the F.D. to get me out.
I also remember launching myself out of swing-sets and falling 15 feet into pea gravel and then immediately doing it again. Today, that would result in either my premature death or paralysis.
i didn't work in an elementary school, so i do not know about the rope. i would think that they stopped that when they stopped teaching wrestling in elementary school and stopped dodgeball and "bombardment" due to liability. but i remember climbing up to the rafters and having a weird feeling in my junk afterward lol...
i do think that PE should be used for education to teach them things that they can use for their lifetime, such as nutrition, proper wound care, proper first aid/injury care, c.p.r, proper stretching and flexibility (the number one reason for most athletic injuries and low back pain that costs us billions a year in lost wages, but i digress), and proper maintainance of the human body. people would live longer, be less obese, and be less sick if they were taught how to be well. parents obviously can not teach them all of these things, so the schools should have a hand in it IMO..
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
1. they are not used to falling so they lack the body control of how to position themselves to fall safely.
2. adults have larger body mass, weigh more, have more bone density, all of those things make you fall harder and create more trauma. i see people who have fallen every day and most times if they get to our office it was not pretty. so it is a good thing to be scared of falling. it is human instinct as an adult.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
I completely disagree. I have volunteered at a well stocked food bank for 3 years. I have been in the van as it goes around to local grocery stores and picked up donations, I have worked the line where people choose what they want.........Do you know what is donated more than anything?.................
................ Pastries. Bread. Rolls. Pies. Cakes. Cupcakes....all that over sugared crap that won't sell in the bakery. White flour which turns into sugar, which turns into fat. Many of the people i see in the distribution line have limited choices. Why? Although we do get some fresh vegetables, we dont' have enough to go around. And I'm talking poor. Some of these people have no income at all. Do you think they give a shit how healthy something is, they will eat anything and take anything to feed their children.
On another note. If we want kids to slim down, TURN OFF THE BLOODY TV!
There is something kind of fucked up if people who are so hungry they are going to food banks are obese.
WASHINGTON — Obesity puts a drag on the wallet as well as health, especially for women.
Doctors have long known that medical bills are higher for the obese, but that is only a portion of the real-life costs.
George Washington University researchers added in things like employee sick days, lost productivity, even the need for extra gasoline — and found the annual cost of being obese is $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man.
That is far more than the cost of being merely overweight — $524 for women and $432 for men, concluded the report being released Tuesday, which analyzed previously published studies to come up with a total.
Why the difference between the sexes? Studies suggest larger women earn less than skinnier women, while wages don't differ when men pack on the pounds. That was a big surprise, said study co-author and health policy professor Christine Ferguson.
Researchers had expected everybody's wages to suffer with obesity, but "this indicates you're not that disadvantaged as a guy, from a wage perspective," said Ferguson, who plans to study why.
Then consider that obesity is linked to earlier death. While that is not something people usually consider a pocketbook issue, the report did average in the economic value of lost life. That brought women's annual obesity costs up to $8,365, and men's to $6,518.
The report was financed by one of the manufacturers of gastric banding, a type of obesity surgery.
The numbers are in line with other research and are not surprising, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health economist at Duke University who wasn't involved in the new report.
Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Nearly 18 percent of adolescents now are obese, facing a future of diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.
Looking at the price tag may help policymakers weigh the value of spending to prevent and fight obesity, said Schulman, pointing to factors like dietary changes over the past 30 years and physical environments that discourage physical activity.
"We're paying a very high price as a society for obesity, and why don't we think about it as a problem of enormous magnitude to our economy?" he asks. "We're creating obesity and we need to do a man-on-the-moon effort to solve this before those poor kids in elementary school become diabetic middle-aged people."
A major study published last year found medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for the obese than normal-weight people. Tuesday's report added mostly work-related costs — things like sick days and disability claims — related to those health problems.
It also included a quirky finding, a study that calculated nearly 1 billion additional gallons of gasoline (3.8 billion liters) are used every year because of increases in car passengers' weight since 1960.
Obesity Healthcare Costs US 147 Billion Dollars A Year, New Study
28 Jul 2009
The annual healthcare cost of obesity in the US has doubled in less than a decade and may be as high as 147 billion dollars a year says new government-sponsored research.
The study was conducted by researchers at RTI International, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is published in the 27 July issue of the health policy journal Health Affairs.
For the study, which was funded by the CDC Foundation, lead author Dr Eric Finkelstein, director of RTI's Public Health Economics Program, and colleagues analyzed data from the 1998 and 2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys.
They found that:
* In 1998 the medical costs of obesity in the US were estimated at around 78.5 billion dollars a year, half of which was financed by Medicare and Medicaid (government health insurance for seniors and families on low incomes).
* Between 1998 and 2006, the prevalence of obesity in the US went up by 37 per cent.
* This rise in obesity prevalence added 40 billion dollars to the annual healthcare bill for obesity.
* The annual healthcare costs of obesity could be as high as 147 billion dollars for 2008.
* Obesity is now responsible for 9.1 per cent of annual medical costs compared with 6.5 per cent in 1998.
* The medical costs for an obese person are 42 per cent higher than for a person of normal weight.
* This equates to an additional 1,429 dollars per year: the costs for an obese person on Medicare are even greater.
* Much of the additional Medicare cost for an obese person are the result of the added prescription drug benefit.
* Medicare prescription drug payments for obese recipients are about 600 dollars a year more than for normal weight recipients.
* Obesity accounts for 8.5 per cet of Medicare expenditure, 11.8 per cent of Medicaid expenditure, and 12.9 per cent of private insurance expenditure.
The authors defined obesity as having a body mass index, BMI, higher than 30. BMI is the ratio of a person's weight in kilos to the square of their height in metres.
Finkelstein told the press that:
"Although bariatric surgery and other treatments for obesity are increasing in popularity, in actuality these treatments remain rare."
"As a result, the medical costs attributable to obesity are almost entirely a result of costs generated from treating the diseases that obesity promotes," he added, suggesting that as long as obesity prevails to the extent that it does today, it will continue to be a significant burden on health care.
Representatives of the CDC are discussing the findings of the study together with new recommendations for preventing and reducing the impact of obesity in communities at "Weight of the Nation", a three-day conference that started on Monday and is being held in Washington, DC.
The CDC describes how it arrived at the recommendations in the 24 July issue of its weekly MMWR Recommendations and Reports.
The recommendations cover 24 strategies in six areas: promoting availability of healthy food; supporting choice of healthy food; encouraging breastfeeding; promoting exercise and physical activity in children and young people; creating communities where people feel safe to exercise and be more physically active; and helping communities organize for change.
"Annual Medical Spending Attributable To Obesity: Payer- And Service-Specific Estimates."
Eric A. Finkelstein, Justin G. Trogdon, Joel W. Cohen, and William Dietz.
Health Affairs , Web Exclusive, July 27, 2009
"Recommended Community Strategies and Measurements to Prevent Obesity in the United States."
Laura Kettel Khan, Kathleen Sobush, Dana Keener, Kenneth Goodman, Amy Lowry, Jakub Kakietek, Susan Zaro.
For the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
MMWR Recommendations and Reports, July 24, 2009, Volume 58 Number RR-7 (PDF download).
Sources: RTI, CDC.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Nothing breaks my heart more than seeing obese parents with their an obese child (under 10 years of age or so)
Good parenting job.
To recap: We are a lazy, gluttonous society.