Outline

Introduction

-Thesis Statement: Childhood obesity has many causes such as lack of proper nutrition in the home and school settings, lack of exercise, and poor nutritional models being set by the parents , in addition to a lack of knowledge about nutrion by parents. All of these causes have a negative impact on the mental and physical health of children.

 -Get audience to care: While childhood obesity can be found around the world it is extrenely common within our own country. Obesity is currently considered to be the most prevalent nutritional disease of children and adolescents in the United States (Etelson).  In order for childhood obesity prevention to be successful it will require participation by the parents.

Definitions:

·         Obesity: Obesity is an abnormal accumulation of body fat, usually 20% or more over an individual's ideal body weight. Obesity is associated with increased risk of illness, disability, and death.

·         Overweight: weighing too much or more than is considered normal or proper.

·         Portion: an amount of food served for one person; serving; helping.

·         Calorie: a unit of food energy.

Review of Literature

·         The article "Childhood obesity: public-health crisis, common sense cure," written by Cara B Ebbeling, PhD, Dorata B Pawlak, PhD, and Dr. David S Ludwig, MD, discusses prevalence of childhood obesity and the potential causes of childhood obesity.  They attribute many of the causes of childhood obesity to environmental factors.  They also discuss the many negative effects that childhood obesity has on the child's life.  In order to present their argument the authors use a wide variety of information that covers and supports all of their claims. The authors also bring up several possible solutions in order to help eliminate the problem of childhood obesity.  The authors present their information in a very clear and concise manner.

·         In their book, Obesity in Childhood and Adolescence,  H. Dele Davies, Hiram E. Fitzgerald, and Vasiliki Mousouli discuss some of the causes of childhood obesity.  They propose that environmental and genetic factors play a large role in the issue of childhood obesity. They discuss how the increase of portion size over the last 40 years has led portions to be of an excessive size that now need to be reduced.  The consequence of these larger portion sizes is that they are leading to a higher caloric intake.  In order to support their claims the authors provide significant data from a variety of sources.

·         In their article, "Childhood Obesity, Prevalence, and Prevention," Mahshid Dehghan, Noori Akhtar-Danesh, and Anwar T. Merchant analyze the ways in which childhood obesity is caused and the ways in which it can be prevented.  They start off strongly in their article, bringing up statistics that show exactly how prevalent childhood obesity is. In the prevention section of the article the authors discuss that there will have to be primary and secondary methods of prevention in order to control and reduce the amount of childhood obesity that is currently prevalent.  In order to support their ideas the authors provide a variety of sources to support their ideas for childhood obesity prevention.

·         Louisa J. Ellis, BSc, PhD wrote an article, entitled "Prevention of Childhood Obesity," that discusses the root causes of childhood obesity and many ways in which it can be prevented.  She suggests that childhood obesity be better monitored in order to prevent it from becoming a problem.  In order to support her ideas she discusses in depth the manners in which this disease is caused, and the variety of ways in which it can prevented.

·         Thomas N. Robinson,  MD, MPH discusses some of the plausible causes of childhood obesity in his article "Does Television Cause Childhood Obesity?". He presents statistics showing the amount of television viewed by children of the current generation, compared to the children of previous generations. He also discusses some techniques for preventing childhood obesity. In order to make his paper effective he presents a variety of statistics from many credible sources.

·         Within their article “Childhood Obesity: Do Parents Recognize this health risk” Debra Etelson, Donald A. Brand, Patricia A. Patrick, and Anushree Shirali evaluate parents understanding of their child’s excess weight as a health risk, and determined whether or not parents were able to recognize obesity within their own child.  They used an anonymous questionaire that was handed out during well-care check ups at pediatric offices. A parent’s perception of their child was considered to be accurate if it deviated from the child’s growth chart by less than 30 points.  It was determined that majority of parents failed to realize that their children were overweight or obese.

Argument/Analysis

Within my research I have determined that there are wide variety of cause of childhood obesity.  However it is evident that the only real solution to the problem will be getting the parents involved and ensuring that they are educated. It is also going to be necessary for the parents to provide their children with positive role models. Every author backed up their claims with statistics and data that demonstrated the ways in which childhood obesity is caused and the ways in which parents are lacking knowledge about childhood obesity.

Conclusion 

In order to bring an end to childhood obesity, educating parents as well as the children will be vital. Parents play an important role if their child's lives up until that child moves out of their home.  Parents need to be providing their children with proper nutrition and setting good nutritional role models. It will be necessary to have a combination of support from the parents, the school districts, and the government in order to put a stop to childhood obesity.