Obesity In Children Becoming The Rising Trend ; Here's How To Keep Your Child's Weight In Check

Childhood Obesity On A Rise

COVID-19 upended our lives in more ways than one. While it affected some people directly, people were either infected with the sickness or became collateral harm. While children are still a vulnerable age group in the second wave of the pandemic, new research shows that children in India are overweight, lead a sedentary lifestyle, and have poor health and fitness. According to a poll of Delhi children conducted by Sportz Village Schools, over 51% of the children had an unhealthy BMI, implying that one out of every two children have poor lifestyle habits and may be overweight.

Childhood Obesity Is Concerning

According to statistics, 6-8 percent of Indian schoolchildren are obese, which is a major public health concern. Obesity in children can be caused by a variety of factors, including lifestyle, genetics, and hormones. Children who are obese have a higher chance of developing serious health problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, bone, and joint problems, etc.

Ways To Control Obesity

Since children with obesity are at a higher risk of immediate and future health risks, it is important to maintain a healthy weight by helping them develop good lifestyle habits. Here are some changes you can make to your regimen.

Develop Healthy Eating Habits

The best to maintain a healthy weight is to develop healthy eating habits including eating plenty of vegetables, fruits, low-fat or non-fat dairy products, making them drink lots of water, eat more protein-rich foods, limit carbonated drinks and lower their consumption of sugar and saturated fat.

Promote Portion Control

When cooking, make just enough for everyone to have a single serving at each meal. If you have leftovers, put them in the fridge or freezer before sitting down to eat to avoid overeating during meals.

Get Your Children Moving

Regular physical activity is important for adults as well as children. With the digital age and COVID pandemic, kids have become lazy. Experts suggest that children aged 6-17 should exercise at least 60 minutes a day. It will help strengthen bones, decrease blood pressure, increase self-esteem, help with weight management, reduce stress and anxiety.

Get Adequate Sleep

Sleep deprivation is linked to obesity, in part because lack of sleep causes us to consume more and be less active. Children require more sleep than adults, and the amount required varies according to age. Kids aged 6-12 should get at least 9-12 hours of sleep in a day and (13-18) should sleep for 8-10 hours per 24 hours.

Don’t Use Food As A Punishment Or Reward

Choose non-food incentives, rewards, and penalties for regulating your children's behaviour.

Feed Them Healthy Snacks

Work with your children to prepare snack bags ahead of time so that fresh fruits and veggies are available to eat when they return home from school.

Parents set an example for the kids, and you can do that by making simple changes to your family’s daily routine. Taking the stairs, parking in the farthest spot, or getting off the bus a stop early and walking the rest of the way are all options.

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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Here's how changing diets might drive global rise in childhood obesity

A new study has found that changing diets, not less physical activity, may best explain childhood obesity crisis.

Variation in consumption of market-acquired foods outside of a traditional diet - but not in total calories burned daily - is reliably related to indigenous Amazonian children's body fat, according to a new study.

The study which was led by researchers at Baylor University offers insight into the global obesity epidemic.

"The importance of a poor diet versus low energy expenditure on the development of childhood obesity remains unclear," said Samuel Urlacher, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and lead author of the study.

"Using gold-standard measures of energy expenditure, we show that relatively lean, rural forager-horticulturalist children in the Amazon spend approximately the same total number of calories each day as their much fatter peri-urban counterparts and, notably, even the same number of calories each day as children living in the industrialized United States.

"Variation in things like habitual physical activity and immune activity have no detectable impact on children's daily energy expenditure in our sample," he said.

The study - "Childhood Daily Energy Expenditure Does Not Decrease with Market Integration and Is Not Related to Adiposity in Amazonia" - is published in The Journal of Nutrition, the American Society for Nutrition's flagship journal, and was funded by the National Science Foundation.

"That initial result alone is exciting in confirming our prior finding of relative stability in children's daily energy expenditure across different lifestyles and environments," Urlacher said. "But our study goes further. It shows that Amazonian children who eat more high-calorie market foods -- but not those who spend fewer calories every day -- consistently have more body fat.

"Together, these findings support the view that change in diet is likely the dominant factor driving the global rise in childhood obesity, particularly in the context of rapid urbanization and market integration in low- and middle-income countries," he said.

The global rate of overweight/obesity among school-age children and adolescents has risen from 4 per cent in 1975 to 18 per cent as of 2016, according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration. That reflects a major global health crisis. Children who are overweight/obese often remain so into adulthood. They have shorter life expectancy and a greater lifetime risk of developing noncommunicable diseases, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

"While the most rapid rise in childhood overweight and obesity is now in rural areas and in low- and middle-income countries, few previous studies have actually measured, rather than simply estimated, children's energy expenditure in these settings to identify the cause of energy imbalance," Urlacher said.

To investigate school-age children's diets and energy expenditure during early market integration and transition to overweight/obesity, Urlacher and co-researchers* collected data among 43 rural and 34 peri-urban Shuar children in Amazonian Ecuador. The Shuar are a large indigenous population of around 50,000. Children in the rural study sample live in a geographically isolated region and rely predominantly on a subsistence-based lifestyle based on hunting, fishing, foraging and small-scale horticulture. In contrast, children in the peri-urban study sample live in a regional market center with access to roads, a hospital, stores, restaurants and other market amenities.

To measure variation in market integration among households, researchers collected information on things such as income and access to running water. They also measured children's physical activity using wearable devices and immune activity by measuring biomarkers in minimally invasive finger-prick blood samples. Most importantly, the researchers measured children's daily energy expenditure using the "doubly labeled water" stable isotope-tracking method and children's resting energy expenditure using respirometry - both participant-friendly, gold-standard techniques.

The study found that:

Peri-urban children average 65 pre cent more body fat than rural children, with more than a third of peri-urban children classified as overweight compared to zero rural children.

Peri-urban children eat more than four times as many market-acquired items as rural children. Peri-urban and rural children have similar levels of physical activity.Peri-urban children spend 108 calories per day less than rural children while at rest. This is related in part to 16-47 per cent lower levels of immune activity.

Measures of market integration, immune activity and physical activity have no detectable impact on children's overall energy expenditure, with peri-urban and rural children spending roughly the same number of calories.

Variation in consumption of market foods, but not in daily energy expenditure, is related to children's body fat.

The study is the first to measure children's energy expenditure across market integration in a single population simultaneously with measures of diet, physical activity and immune activity. The finding of no effect of market integration on measured daily energy expenditure is consistent with previous reports among adults and infants, Urlacher said. It also supports an evolutionary model of childhood energy constraint and allocation trade-offs described in detail by the researchers in their 2019 paper published in the journal Science Advances.

By measuring multiple aspects of the energy balance equation simultaneously, the researchers believe that their findings provide persuasive evidence for a likely primary role of changing dietary intake, rather than reduced daily energy expenditure, in driving the rise in childhood obesity in many populations.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     

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https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
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Health complications of childhood obesity

Being overweight is an open invitation to various health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and joint problems, etc. However, when you gain those extra kilos early in your life, you are more likely to develop stress as you grow older. A new research conducted at the Washington State University states that pregnant women should work out regularly to reduce their little one’s chances of becoming obese by enhancing the metabolic health of their kid. Maintaining a healthy metabolic system is crucial as it helps you to ward off various disease that are associated with obesity. Here, we share with you some of the health complications obese children may experience.

Diabetes: Diabetes and obesity go hand in hand, people who are overweight are usually prone to experience fluctuation in their blood sugar levels. As per the findings of a 2015 study published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, the prevalence rate of diabetes is 0.26 per every 1000 children.

High cholesterol: If you are overweight, you are more likely to develop cardiovascular problems. This is because obesity can up your cholesterol levels which is the reason behind blockage in your blood vessels that impairs the blood flow inside your body.

Skin rashes: If you are obese, your body will store moisture in the body folds that leads to growth of bacteria and fungi which causes skin rashes and numerous skin-related problems.

Bone problems: When you are overweight, it means you are putting more pressure on your bones (more than they can bear) which leads to weaken bones. This dip in bone density makes them more pore to injury.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement