Obesity Among Children

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Obesity is a phenomenon that reached an epidemic level among children in developed countries. Many factors are behind that; and obesity, of course, has tremendous effects on children’s health as well as on their psychological state. Some of the consequences of obesity are used to be frequent among adults, but nowadays, children have it. In a journal article reporting a study done by Stephen R and Daniels, in addition that now children are having their parents’ diseases, the phenomenon is increasing in high frequency, and the types of diseases include high blood pressure, early symptoms of hardening of the arteries, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, polycystic ovary disorder, and disordered breathing during sleep, another point made by Daniels and Stephen is that the obesity destroys the human body, but if it starts from the childhood, it actually accelerate its effects which in his turn causes the heart attack, or stroke, to start in childhood. Another point made by Daniels is that the effect of obesity doesn’t stop at this point, but it may go to the extent to reverse the stable increase in life expectancy which makes of obesity one of the most public concerns; thus efforts are being made to determine what causes obesity among children(Stephen, & Daniels, 2006, p 47-67). One reality is obvious, children are usually not born overweight, but the environment around them makes from them what they are, and the principal cause of that is the fact that parents don’t run to the doctors to check their child as soon as they notice on him an overweight because they may think that their child just got a bit of baby fat (Holecko, 2010), or they may not know that their child is actually obese, not just overweight. The norms used by doctors to determine whether a child is obese or overweight are based on the BMI,” A child (between the ages of 2 and 18) is
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