Obesity In High School

With health problems on the rise today in modernized societies, maintaining physical fitness has escalated from an issue of adulthood to one of adolescence. Over the past years, schools have initiated many programs to promote wellness, but action to alleviate the sources of health problems has not been taken. Today, with rates of obesity exponentially rising among high school students, it is obvious that schools must take action for the prevention of a health problem like obesity, which catalyzes major illnesses such as diabetes and cancer.
From the mid-1960s to 2008, the percentage of American children who were obese more than quadrupled—rising from 4.6 percent to 18.1 percent among teenagers, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2010a). Although most experts pointed to the increasingly prevalent roles of cars, television, and computers in children's lives as reasons for increasing obesity in teenagers, prolonged sitting is actually the main reason for this surge (Issues A-Z: Student Health). According to studies done by the Mayo Clinic, “Research has linked …show more content…
The most effective one is to attack prolonged sitting during the school day. Schools can approach this problem with many different resolutions. For instance, schools have purchased hybrid desks that students can sit at, or pull up and stand behind, but these desks are quite expensive. Essentially, the most cost-efficient and easy-to-implement would be schools and their teachers coming together to create a plan that incorporates at least five to seven minutes of movement from the usual fifty five minutes. Specifically, teachers may instruct students to move desks into clusters for group work and then back into their original setting at the end of class, or tweak lesson plans to allow for something that is more active for the students than sitting and