Persuasive Essay On Obesity

In this day and age it seems like everyone is supersized you can’t walk down the street without seeing someone who is obese. Obesity is a growing problem in America almost 36% of American adults have a BMI that considers them to be obese well 69% are considered overweight or obese, we have come to a world where it is more common to be overweight than to be healthy. The problem could be easily solved if we could just teach better eating habits to our next generation but the problem of obesity has f spread to our kids. 19.5% of children are now obese and that number is growing so if we don’t do something soon our children will have terrible health problems. We need new plans to teach kids about healthy eating, give them more exercise, and give …show more content…
All children need a minimum of 60 minutes a day of being outside and moving(CDC, 2015) but that is just a minimum and if they were able to move all day it would be even better. A survey done in 2013 found that only 27 percent of high school; students got 60 minutes of activity a day(CDC, 2013). But this the minimum for health and they will only be the minimal amount of healthy. All schools need to put plans into action to give at least K-6 graders an hour of activity a day. We also need to stop cutting out activity in the 7+ grades as kids lose free time and get packed with homework. All kids need to have at least one physical activity a day, it does not need to be a sport but 7th graders and up should have to take a P.E. once a day for physical health. If every kid exercised too they would focus more which could lead to less HW and more activity outside. But don’t kids have enough work? Shouldn’t school be top priority? Kids do have a lot of work but physical health either starts at a young age and blossoms or they have to catch up later in life. Also kids don’t need the social pressure that could come with being overweight, as it could lower their self esteem and make them do even worse at …show more content…
80 percent of parents can not even recognize if their child is at the 98th percentile in weight or in other words heavier than 98 percent of kids their same age( Black, 2015). Lots parents are too focused on the good things in their kids and completely ignore anything bad or wrong. It is both a blessing and curse as it can give the kid more self esteem and confidence, but on the other hand kids are less likely to get help from things that are wrong when parents only think the kid is perfect. If doctors gave parents the tools to be able to tell if the kid is just muscular or if they have weight problem than maybe parents would know how to deal with it and when to. Well maybe my kid will grow out of it? Can someone grow out of other problems? Can you grow out of a drug addiction by pure abuse and continuing the habits, or how about a birth defect, or what about being albino, can you grow out of that? No. So what makes someone so sure obesity is just a phase. I do admit within the several stages of puberty kids do get a little extra weight sometimes but not to the extent where they are obese. The BMI scale isn’t the best way to determine obesity in every situation as some people are naturally very muscular but you wouldn’t confuse a bodybuilder with a sumo