Obesity In Foster Care

In the last past 20 years, obesity has been on a steady incline. Obesity has become a major public health problem. It affects every age, gender and racial/ethnic group. Although it does not discriminate, some groups are more predisposed to becoming obese than others. The prevalence of being over weight/obese is higher in minority children and adolescents. Obesity can develop from sustained energy imbalance, along with genetic, behavior, cultural, environmental, and economic factors. The goal of this project is to help children in foster care to maintain a normal body weight. This will be achieved by monthly measuring of height and weight per the height and weight table, recommended by the World Health Organization, for children in foster …show more content…
The body mass index was calculated for the group of children and out of the 115 boys and 90 girls the overweight/obese percentage was 24% (Hadfield and Preece, 2008). The findings of this study was that 81% of the children were at normal weight upon entering into the foster care system which decreased to 61% after an extended period of time in care (Hadfield and Preece, 2008). The study does not mention other possible factors that may have an impact on weight gain. It does not include any information concerning physical activities or the lack there of. The study does not take into consideration that medications being taken may have an effect on the body …show more content…
They must be trained and abreast on different groups and the disparities that exist. One study finding was that the physical level of activities were low for most adolescents, but extremely low for Black and Hispanics with much emphasis on minority females (Basch, 2011). This was mentioned due to many contributing factors being that recreational facilities are not equally distributed, for example many of the minority do not have assess to safe recreational facilities (Basch, 2011). Social economic status has an effect on the possibility of a person becoming obese. They may not have the money to buy healthy food so they would buy the cheapest food and try to make it stretch, which may not be the most nutritional. They may not have parks and recreational facilities within walking distance of their home. They may not have transportation to get to the ones that are a distance away. The ability to pay to go to a recreational facility often is not an option. The first thing that needs to be done for this population is to create safe places for them to live, work, and