Obesity and Weight Gain is A Major Problem in Children’s Lifestyles

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 1:54 PM

Canada, like many other nations around the world, has a tremendous growth in the number of obese people. Currently, 59 per cent of Canadians are either overweight or obese and that is a much too high percentage for our supposedly healthy society. What’s even worse is that we are letting many of our adolescent communities reach this point of being overweight, or even obese.

Currently, a whooping 26 per cent of Canadian children from the ages or 2 to 17 years old are either overweight or obese. The rate of these obese children has almost tripled in the past 25 years. This clearly shows that we are doing something wrong to help create a healthier and happier life for our future teenagers and adults.

These drastic weight increments will cause our children to have future serious health risks such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke, metabolic syndrome, cancer, sleep apnea, gallbladder disease, fatty liver disease and pregnancy complications. Apart from these serious health risks, other activities are not able to be done because of being overweight, such as playing sports. Many overweight children are not active and this causes them to not be as social as a child with a very healthy and active lifestyle.

Many communities try to help with the adolescent obesity problems by building gyms, selling health foods and trying to promote healthy living through commercials and posters. This is making no change in the obesity problem with our children because even though the healthy choice is there, kids are used to routine and usually don’t want to change their lifestyle.

We need to take action in trying to change the lifestyle of our future adult population by restricting many of the food our stores and cafeterias sell. In my high school, we have six vending machines that sell “junk food” and pop. Every day I see at least 50 kids go and purchase something from these machines even though they have a snack in their lunch. These machines make it so easy to access junk food, which is a major factor in weight gain, so these should be taken out of schools.

Obesity and weight gain is a major problem in our children’s lifestyles and I believe we need to make a change so that we can make a healthy and active future society for our kids. With doing many small things such as substituting junk food vending machines with healthy food, making activity everyday a mandatory thing and changing the food in our cafeteria, we can help the children change their unhealthy life. We need to take action now.

Source: Iain Boar , Mississauga in TheeStar.Com