Many Americans are worried of the non-stop growth of the obesity population. As Morgan Spurlock, the director of the documentary film Super Size Me, stated in an interview, “I couldn't open up a magazine you couldn't read, a newspaper, you couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about the obesity epidemic in America.” Obesity is an excess of body fat. How do one know is obese? Body Mass Index (BMI), it is an accurate indicator of body fat and weight index for a person. This indicator varies in sex and changes as the person grows older. It can be determined by a simple formula, which is the weight in kg divided by the height squared meters. According to BMI in a child, above 95% of body fat one is consider obese. The normal BMI range is from 5% to 85% of body fat. Obesity has become one of the most popular diseases in the U.S. By the end of 2000, The Obesity Association of America statistics showed that 19% of young children from 6 to 11 years old were obese in the U.S. A 15% of children and teenagers, found themselves on the edge of becoming obese. This number is not going down, instead is growing more and more each year. The CRC heath group stated that maintaining an obese child until adulthood would cost about $549,907, so it preferable not to maintain an obese person and instead fight this. Many Americans spends billions of dollars in products and services for losing weight. There are cases where this alternatives work, but the majority of the time they don’t.
Obesity not only causes kids physical and emotional issues, but also serious health problems. Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults too, causing health problems in the future as well. One contributor to this disease, is the behavior kids have; such as unhealthy eating and lack of physical activities. It is rarely seen, cases in which overweight is caused by medical problems like hormonal problems. The category of behavior, introduces nutrition and lack of exercise. Some people believe that obese children usually tend to eat triple than what other kids eat, but that is wrong. Many of them eat the same or just a little bit more, but they are affected because they have bad eating habits. These eating habits have been changing in the past few decades. The majority of the calories ingested by children come from fast foods or snacks that have a lot of salts and sugars. Instead of eating healthy things like fruits, vegetables and food with proteins and fibers, they eat Doritos, Lays, cheeseburgers, French fries, etc. Also the portion that is served of this junk food, has increased throughout the years. Doctor Winston Craig stated that restaurants and fast food shops have increased from a dish of 50 calories to 135 calories, and drinks from 8 ounces to 20 ounces approximately. This explains that American kids are consuming more than half the calories they ate in the past.
Another contributor to this terrible disease are genetics, which play a very important role in obesity. Genes increase the probability to cause obesity, especially when suffering of Prader-Willi syndrome. This syndrome is an anomaly in the 15th chromosome and affects female and male equally. This causes muscle tone, short sized people, incomplete sexual development and non-stop feeling of hunger and desires to eat. The last anomaly mentioned, is the responsible for obesity. Later problems will also be caused by obesity and overweight, like for example other diseases such as Diabetes Type 2, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, breath problems, heart problems, sleeping problems and even depression.
School cafeterias, are also affecting child obesity and unhealthy eating habits a lot. As the famous food editor J.M. Hirsch stated, three-fourths of schools in the U.S. serve an unacceptable amount of fat in their food. The United States Department of Agriculture, established that schools should serve a 30% fat in the lunch total calories. About 80% of schools