Child Obesity

Today I want to talk a bit about "Child Obesity". We just recently returned from a cruise to the Caribbean and my wife and I could not believe how many overweight children there were on the ship. When watching these families almost every single one of these overweight children had one or both parents that were overweight.  If I were to do the BMI calculations on these children and their parents the outcome would surely be that they would actually fall into the "obese" (> 30 BMI) category according to their BMI results. These children when put in this position are extremely hard pressed to come out later in life at a healthy body weight.  In fact, they usually tend to trend towards even greater weight gain and have a higher propensity for diabetes and other diseases. Part of the challenge is that our children adopt our eating habits early in life and if we are not eating healthy and living a balanced lifestyle it is likely that our children are following suit. With obesity and diabetes on the rise around the world we really need to focus on our children to ensure that they adopt good habits and get a fair chance to lead a healthy, balanced life early on.
Here is an interesting article that outlines what we are discussing here: http://www.peoples-health.com/childhood_obesity_facts.htm 

Cheers,

bounce life