CHILDHOOD OBESITY AND DIABETES
In recent decades, obesity and diabetes in US youth and children have become an epidemic. The epidemic is new but it has been spread widely within a short period and has majorly affected people with few resources to stop it. The situation has been accelerated by the fact that over the last 20-30 years there have been several dietary changes and people have helped their kids to feel more comfortable with a different kind of lifestyle. The current adopted lifestyle has excluded physical education which used to be very fundamental in the past.
According to me, parental measures are the most convenient ways that could be relied on to effectively prevent or stop early obesity and diabetes epidemic. The home environment is the first or the primary environment that children interact with. It has a strong influence on the way they perform in almost all their life activities. So families should be the first call in addressing this epidemic. If a child makes an effort to change their diet they may end up being successful but end up feeling different because the family environment portrays something different. If a parent doesn’t make healthier changes then their kid’s attempts to do so will be undermined. Treating obesity and diabetes cannot be achieved by focusing only on the dieting part. The steps should include addressing the child’s and family lifestyle, physical activity patterns and nutrition.
However, family measure can’t be entirely relied on to safe overall population from the epidemic. Not every family that can afford to comply with the measure that is required to cut down obesity threats and this is because at a family level resources are limited to some. Therefore in order to ensure that the nation is safe from this new epidemic, it’s very important to involve government policies and regulations that can help. Some of the regulations that the government could put in place to help with this epidemic include;
- Work with food companies and encourage them to alter their product and marketing in order to reduce health risks
- Government policies could regulate food products that can harm peoples’ weight.
- It can as well monitor restaurants and require them to reduce or completely eliminate artificial trans-fats. Restaurants could be encouraged to include calories to be consumed in their menus and in doing so this could promote the consumer’s knowledge.
- Food companies could also be asked to voluntarily reduce their junk products size packaging.
- Another measure is the inclusion of physical education in schools.
If I was in control of regulating the obesity and diabetes epidemic I would put into consideration some specific steps and incorporate them into the lives of the children and the youth in our country. Some of the steps that I would recommend in the preventing and stopping of the epidemic are as follows;
- Encourage time to time exercise to every young individual
- Ask the adult in the entire living environment to lead as examples. If it’s at home the family should shoe efforts to adopt a healthy living lifestyle, in school health life knowledge should be passed and the whole nation should put health living first.
- Monitoring of weight regularly
- Sedentary lifestyle should be discouraged and kids at home should have a limited schedule to TV watching and schools should include PE programs.