week 10

Hello everyone we did it and made it through... please see my paper and let me know what everyone thinks.


Adolescent obesity and health issues

The time of fast food, video games and busy schedules have seen the children of our time become increasingly obese with their health becoming an issue.
With adolescent obesity and health issues when is the right time to start management of what our children eat? As parents are busier with their schedules also it becomes difficult to watch our children and making sure that they are spending more time outside with physical activities. Obesity has an impact on our biologic and behavior that is associated with socially constructed attitudes and beliefs. (Sweeting, 2008) Obesity can be defined as an excess of body fat that is not homogeneous. Clinically it is shown that the body fat is mainly proportion to the hormones of each sex. The biological effect can be broken down to the difference of male and females.
Males have a fat pattern represented with a relatively higher level of body fat in the upper body. It has been acceptable to society for them to see males become heavier due to being masculine. Difficult at times to distinguish if it is really fat or muscle that the males develop when they are maturing due to the unnatural weight gain they experience. (Sweeting, 2008) Boys at a younger age are more into playing video games in front of the television and staying on the couch inside the house. Long gone are the days when they would rather be outside for hours and not wanting to come inside.
Female patterns are different than the boys that in fact the body fat is more proportion to their hips and thighs. They have thought that girls needed the extra fat while they were going through puberty, but that is not the case as it has not been proven to be of any harm not to have the extra weight. The controversy over weight with girls is still a discussion that goes on today. Girls have always tried to judge themselves against the pictures of models in magazines and on television. Showing that how skinny they are is what the belief of them to be as beautiful as they are portrayed. Society is different in all areas of the world but the Western Society is associated with beauty to include the shape of the woman’s body. (Sweeting, 2008)
For adolescent in today society seems that they are likely to be obese if they come from lower income or poverty level families. The difference in economical or social status does come into play with the adolescent because of the resources in regards to nutrition, exercise and support of a healthier life could be attained with less effort for someone who is wealthy. Eating disorders and body image has been one of the concerns with children when they are overweight. These are more dealing with the mental aspects of a child’s self esteem at times and their welfare in life. If they are low income or living in poverty it bases that food at times becomes either a resource to take as much as you can knowing that you might not have some for a while or that you eat to just keep eating what is in sight. To compound to this children usually did not have too many chances for any type of physical activity with the other issues they had to deal with in life. In low income residential areas it is hard to go for that walk that sometimes is easy for some of us due to the violence or crime that exist.
Pediatricians today have started to educate parents of children as young as two years old in regards to the weight of their child. (Evans, 2010) They use a system called Body Mass Index system or also known as BMI for short. This process is defined by weight (kg)/height square (m2). It is used for measurement with adults by figuring out how much fat mass they have compared to what the standards for their height should be and now after careful considerations the AAP and AMA agree that this information could help parents understand with their children at a younger age if they are overweight for their age. But according to Dr Ned Calonge, that many pediatric care providers have been reluctant to do the screenings for overweight along with referring them for treatment. The sense was that this type of management just did not work. In 2005, USPSTF did a review of the evidence and they found that the recommend BMI as an acceptable measure for identifying children and adolescents with excess weight but did not make any movement towards any management or treatment recommendations. Dr Jonathan D Klein of the University of Rochester and his colleagues have stated that they do not make assessments with using the BMI measuring and only a small section of them believe in the effectiveness of using this type of measurement with adolescents. It is also not easy to be able to find a referral base to help with the education management as the information is not located in all areas at this time. Just as anything else new in the medical field the insurance coverage is just not there which does make it hard for some parents. They do not have the resources to be able to afford a specialist or treatment program sometimes that are not covered by the health coverage.
The problem of childhood obesity in the United States has grown considerably in recent years. Between 16 and 33 percent of children and adolescents are obese. Unhealthy weight gain due to poor diet and lack of exercise is responsible for over 300,000 deaths each year. The annual cost to society for obesity is estimated at nearly $100 billion. Overweight children are much more likely to become overweight adults unless they adopt and maintain healthier patterns of eating and exercise. (www.aacap.org, 2008)
Nutrition is one of the keys to keeping our bodies healthy. We as a society are now used to the ways of fast food and easy preparation of the food that we eat. With that come the extra additives that have been added into our foods now to keep the shelf life longer and make them taste better covering up the chemicals added. Not all children like to eat their vegetables or even for that matter sometimes fruits. Rule of thumb is if they do not believe it to smell and taste good they usually will not touch the food. The diet and eating habit children have is learned by their elders living in the house and their nationality at times. Different nationalities have certain restrictions or beliefs with what foods they do eat.
Some of the health risk that is associated with obesity is hypertension and Diabetes 2. Most of the cases of adolescents with obesity do show one or both of these two types of illness. Over the last decade, type 2 diabetes mellitus has become increasingly common among children and adolescents. Data from diabetes referral centers indicate that type 2 diabetes currently accounts for approximately 40% of patients between the ages of 10 and 19 who are diagnosed with diabetes. (Pinhas-Hamiel, 2003) There is a growing concern that the emerging epidemic of type 2 diabetes among adolescents will prove to be a major challenge to care providers. One of the issue is the prevalence of high-risk lifestyles among family members represents an important barrier to successful treatment. Usually the first degree family members of adolescents diagnosed with diabetes are obese and have diets high in fat intake and none or minimal physical activity. The family members lack of interest in changing their habits or testing to see where the problem lays usually a threat to the treatment of the diagnosis but if the family is prepared to be aggressive in the change of lifestyles it can change the outcome for the whole family. The good thing in regards to these types of illness is that once the weight issue can be diagnosed and managed the illness can be reversed.
The metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents does not have a definition that exists. The syndromes that show as the most frequent is obesity, hypertension, hyperinsulinemia/insulin resistance, IGT/type 2 diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia. Though the levels have been different for each study that has been done and there is no set standards for the waist circumference and WHR that exist for children. (Molnar, 2004) The risk of cardiovascular has been proven to be higher for obese children than non obese children and that they tend to cluster. Obese children have shown to have raised diastolic and systolic blood pressure with high LDL cholesterol. Their HDL would be low with raised triglycerides and high fasting insulin concentration. Freedman and co-workers, in one study found that 58% of obese 5-10 year olds show at least one the five cardiovascular risk factors, and 25% had two or more.

We have to educate ourselves as parents and healthcare providers better when it comes to our children of today. No longer can we sit back and just think that the extra weight that the children are carrying is simple baby fat. To believe that they will just naturally lose it without proper nutrition and physical activity we are just being naive.












Reference Page
Evans, J. (2010). USPSTF: Start Obesity Management at Age 6. Family Practice News , 1-2.
Molnar, D. (2004). The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes mellitus in children and adolescents. International Journal of Obesity & Related Metabolic Disorders , 70-74.
Pinhas-Hamiel, O. Z. (2003). Barriers to the treatment of adolescent type 2 diabetes-a survvey of provider perceptions. Pediatric Diabetes , 2-28.
Sweeting, H. N. (2008). Gendered dimensions of obesity in childhood and adolescence. Nutrition Journal , 1475 - 2891.
www.aacap.org. (2008, May). Retrieved from American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

week 9

Well everyone we are almost done. It is the final turn to the finish line which we all have either looked forward to so that we could be proud of the papers that have been written or we are dreading as we have put of doing the paper.

I wish everyone luck and can't really wait till next week so that I can read some of the papers that we all have worked very hard on.


Good luck classmates.

week 8

Well this week has been very full for me. My youngest just graduated from high school and is preparing to go to college in 2 months. she has been my biggest supporter with school and I hope to make both of my girls proud to finish my goal by the time both of them graduate from college..

Week 7

hello fellow bloggers.

I know that we posted our papers on discussion this week but would like for honest opinion on what people think so far of my paper. I did it again of having writers block with working on this paper. It comes and goes but I do think that I might be over thinking this whole paper issue at times and then having the writers block. I know that this all is a mental issue and will need to work this out on my own...

anyone else that reads my posting could you please give me an honest opinion on here or in class would be greatly appreciated.

Have a good week....

Week 6

Well we are about done with our class and everyone like me is working very hard on their papers. I have an outline done on my paper but I am nervous that I do not have enough information. I want to post it on here tomorrow so that everyone can help with reading it and let me know your honest opinions of what your thoughts are on my topic.

week 5

Hello everyone, hope everyone is doing well. I have had one of those weeks that just kept me on my toes with all the surprise that hopefully one person can handle. Belief it or not it all happened at work...lol I run an urgent care here in Las Vegas. It never seems to amaze me with the way people sometimes treat people when they are sick and especially if they are sick on vacation. I sometimes wonder if the way they treat my staff with the nonsense and unexpected treatment if they would do that to their own physicians back home. If they do I wonder how many doctors they actually have gone through.

I understand that when a person is ill that they may not feel like being nice but we are all human and it would be nice if people would remember that we are in this business to take care of people because we want to and not because we have to do it for fun.

Week 4

Fellow classmates hope that you are doing fine in class and everything seems to be going good for you. We are close to being halfway done with classes it doesnt even seem that tomorrow we will be starting on week 5 already.

Working on our final papers in between all the other work seems tiresome at times but hopefully will be worth all of the work by the time we are done.