Child Abesity is Unhealthy

Not even a crazy situation like childhood diabetes or high blood pressure, can push a child close to catastrophe as much as child obesity can. The claim, coming from extensive research done on thousands of children is that obesity children are twice as likely as any normal child, to die by the age of 55, either through falling ill or through suicide. If you like to read the New England Journal of Medicine, you’d see this obesity article in a recent issue. What makes this study on child obesity so compelling is that they took the trouble to pick thousands of children for their research, and to follow them for decades.

Take Care of Child Obesity Now

So, when it comes to child obesity, this isn’t something that can be taken care of later. If the child is obese now it will more than likely have effects on their life expectancy and health, 40 years later, even if they pull themselves together and lose weight by then. Of course, to late-night talk show hosts and stand-up comedians around the country, kids obesity has been a big source of cheap laughs for years. But, when it comes to obesity in America, this is really no laughing matter since one in three children in America falls in the overweight or obesity category. Something really serious in the body appears to get damaged with obese children. And so, perhaps it is just as well that the first lady, Michelle Obama, is following up her campaign to get America to each more greens, with a campaign to end obesity in childhood.

The study actually took up and followed ten-year-old children who lived in Indian reservations, starting around the year 1945. They happened to pick American Indian children, because the obesity problem started out much earlier in that population than it did in the general American population. They kept following those very children until many of them began to die by the year 2000 of poor health. Plenty more were lost to alcoholism and drugs. This was not something that happened to the thin children as they grew up. Kids who suffered from child obesity, were more than twice as likely to die by 55; children with high glucose levels, were one-and-a-half times more likely to die by that age too.

Child Obesity Can Cause Other Health Problems

Child obesity isn’t just bad because it makes children likely to be affected by other symptoms. Childhood obesity is just dangerous in and of itself. It may be easy to dismiss a study like this, pointing to how it was done on a different race of people altogether. But, they found that American Indians in their health, always seem to lead the rest of the nation by a few decades. By studying this group of people on the causes of child obesity or even other illnesses, seems to always give scientists a window into the future.