Symptoms Of Childhood Obesity

In America about one in three adolescents are overweight or obese. Topping smoking and drug abuse, childhood obesity is the number one health concern among parents. How to know if your child is overweight? You can do it yourself by inputting your child 's weight and height into a body mass calculator (BMI). Once you get the child 's BMI, you compare it to a child BMI chart. Underweight is BMI below the 5th percentile, normal-weight is BMI at the 5th and less than the 85th percentile, overweight is BMI at the 85th and below the 95th percentiles, and obese is BMI at or above the 95th percentile. Childhood obesity takes a emotional toll on children. In some children genetics do play a roll in them being obese. It can cause minor to major health …show more content…
In some cases, medications, endocrine problems, and genetic syndromes can be associated with excessive weight gain (‘Overweight and obesity’, 2012). Peoples daily lives are so busy that they don 't have time to prepare healthy home cooked meals, so they resort to fast foods or microwaveable foods which are so unhealthy. Now days kids spend most of their free time sitting down playing on their electronics or watching TV, instead of being active outside. Schools are also cutting back or eliminating their physical education programs. Childhood obesity can cause many comorbidities. These include but not limited to: (a) cardiovascular, (b) abnormalities in the endocrine system ,(c) orthopedic, (d) gastrointestinal, and (e) psychosocial systems. Moreover, obesity during adolescence makes the risk greater for diseases and premature death during adulthood. Children are twice as likely as their normal-weight peers to get certain cancers and by the time they are barley ten years old, some obese children are pushed into puberty by bodies that are ready to reproduce even if they aren 't ready to be sexually active (Park,