childhood obesity statistics

Childhood Obesity Statistics: Can the Xbox Kinect Help?

November 1, 2012 by James Bogash

I’ve addressed the chemical and dietary aspects of childhood obesity statistics. Clearly, though, exercise plays a role as well. Could technology help obese kids?

It’s a dream that every kid has. The parents condoning the use of video games. In the past, this really hasn’t been an option due to the inherently sedentary nature of video game playing.

But that has been changing. It started with the Nintendo Wi and has moved forward with the Playstation move and the Xbox Kinect. If you’ve never played these games before, they vary from sitting on the couch swishing around the controller to all out physical activity with games like Just Dance, Kinect Sports, Fighters Uncaged or Kinect Adventures.

These games can really help you break a sweat. But just how much?

This particular study was designed to answer just that question.

Researchers looked at the calories burned while a small group of kids aged 11-15 played two different Xbox Kinect games for 15 minutes: Dance Central and Kinect Sports Boxing. Here are the findings:

Heart rate, oxygen uptake, and energy expenditure were considerably higher with these games.
The Dance Central increased calorie burning by 150%.
The Boxing increased calorie burning by 263%.

Not too shaby for something the kids may actually enjoy and can be done year round, regardless of hot or cold temps. AND, to top it all off, this is clearly something you can do as a family. Many of the games, like Kinect Adventures, allows you to compete against one another. We break the family into two teams for some nice competitive fun.

Incidentally, this is not the first study to look at what might happen in a household that uses these types of games. In May of 2011 a study looked at the weight of children who were given a Wii system instead of their normal, sedentary-type video games and found definate improvements in 6 months.

If you have played the Xbox Kinect before, what games did your family really seem to like and helped everyone get more exercise?

Childhood Obesity Statistics: Blame Artificial Sweeteners

October 29, 2012 by James Bogash

I know I’ve written frequently on childhood obesity statistics lately, but are you really paying attention to everything your child is putting in their mouth?

You’ve banned artificial sweeteners. No more diet soda. You read one of my blog posts on just how unhealthy artificial sweeteners are, and you instantly tossed what you had in the house into the garbage. You’ve scrapped the plastic water bottles and cheap soup cans to ban BPA as well.

You’ve even searched out the labels where artificial sweeteners like sucralose (Splenda) lurks; some juices, “energy” drinks, even drink “enhancers” like Mio. You’ve vowed to not use any of the Nuun Active Hydration during your Susan Komen 3-day hike because of the acesulfame potassium. You’ve told your primary care doctor that Medifast is not going to help you lose weight in the long run.

Your family is all set and your children are happily chewing their gum in the back seat, artificial sweetener free.

Wait…chewing gum?

You slam on the brakes as you pull the car to the side of the road and demand to see the pack of Trident that your son is chewing from.

You guessed it. Almost every major brand of gum available now has artificial sweeteners in it. Actually, most seem to have multiple types (Yes-that Trident sugarless gum has acesulfame potassium AND aspartame in addition to the naturally occurring sugar alcohol sorbitol–apparently Trident couldn’t decide just which sweetener it was going to use so it through them all in…).

But it’s just a little amount.

That’s what I hear. It’s just a little. Or it’s just one can of diet soda per day. Or just a few pieces of gum per day. I remember hearing one distributor for a direct marketing “health” company stating that the sucralose in their drink was “just a little.”

Make no mistake–“just a little” is enough for us to taste or it wouldn’t be in there.

Which brings us to this particular article.

Researchers looked at a group of obese children aged 6-18 and compared them to a similar group of normal weight children. They were specifically looking to see if there was a difference in the taste sensations between the two groups. There findings give us some insight into the problems our children are facing:

Obese children were less able to identify salty, bitter and umami (savory) tastes.
Obese kids rated 3 of 4 test strips (with increasing sweet concentrations) as being less sweet.
The greatest difference was in the lowest concentration of “sweet.”
Only at the sweetest concentration did the two groups of children agree on the degree of sweetness.
Overall, girls and older kids were better at picking out the right tastes.

Basically, the obese children seemed less sensitive to “sweet” until the concentration became strong. To me, this would seem to identify a type of tolerance for sweet sensations, much like a drug.

Giving our children sweet this and sweet that, including artificial sweeteners with sensations 1,000 times stronger than table sugar will do nothing but cause problems. I remain very strong of the opinion that giving artificial sweeteners to our children AT ALL, at any age, begins to disassociate taste from our body and brain’s response to sweet. This process can only lead contribute to the worsening childhood obesity statistics as time goes on.

If your child is already stuck in this loop, the first step is to cut out any and ALL artificial sweeteners. Today. If your family chews gum, switch to a xylitol based gum.

From there, begin to cut back on the “sweet” that they are exposed to. That could mean smaller serving sizes. We have frozen yogurt stores here in Arizona that sell by the ounce–you basically fill up as much as you’d like and then top it off with the selections such as bad stuff, fruit and nuts. I can tell you that, for 4 of us, we frequently pay just a little more than most of the cups that get filled and dropped on the scale. Do you really need to fill the whole thing?

You can also begin to substitute unsweetened items for the sugary stuff. If they can’t drink tea without a 50:50 sugar:tea mix, begin to gradually cut back on the amount of sugar being added until it’s gone. And do you really need the largest size Starbucks with whipped cream?

What have you done to cut back on your child’s “sweet” intake?

Childhood Obesity Statistics: 12 Reasons for Concern

October 27, 2012 by James Bogash

You try to do everything for your kids’ health. Yet childhood obesity statistics continue to mount. Could something they do doing every day be affecting them?

In today’s overly toxic world there are many things you are exposed to that harm your health and you may not even be aware of them or how likely your exposure is. Some examples include:

While the list is much longer, these are a few that we are all very commonly exposed to. The one I did not put on this list, though, it likely the most common exposure.

That 12 ounce bottled water sitting next to you right now.

Somewhere along the way, society decided that we were at risk of spontaneously desiccating to a husk if we did not have water immediately accessible at every single moment of our lives. Personally, I haven’t seen it happen, but I suppose it could.

This behavior has had a price to pay. The exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has increased as a result of this proximity to bottled water. I have certainly written in past blogs about how bad BPA can be for our health, increasing the risk of obesity, diabetes and certain cancers like breast cancer.

This particular article takes a look at the relationship between BPA exposure and childhood obesity statistics. Researchers looked at the urine BPA levels of children aged 9-19 and looked at how many suffered from childhood obesity. Here’s what they found:

Those with the lowest BPA had the lowest risk of childhood obesity.
Those kids with the highest levels of BPA had a 22% greater risk of being classified as having childhood obesity than the kids with the lowest levels.

Granted, 22% is not a huge number, but given that the childhood obesity statistics are continually heading up, anything we can do to impact this process is a good thing. So scrap the plastic water bottle and start giving your dehydrated children tea in a BPA free water container.

Are you still buying bottled water for your family?

Childhood Obesity Statistics–Where Do We Place the Blame?

October 20, 2012 by James Bogash

It’s very easy to look around and notice that any childhood obesity statistic you point to is headed in an unwanted direction. But what is the best way to fix it?

It started with getting our kids to move more. Sitting around playing video games was destroying our kids’ collective waistlines. If we could just get them moving more life would be great again. Heck–even Ronald McDonald hopped in this bandwagon.

And yet the percentage of obese children continue to grow.

So it must be soda in our schools. Pepsi and Coke weren’t happy about this movement but we did it anyway. And what did we see? Sugar sweetened beverage consumption didn’t change. And how could this be? Because the kids had ready access at home to this marvel of modern chemistry.

We’ve danced around the problem for so long now that we’ve forgotten where it starts. At home.

Sure, school lunches need some work. Sure, we know that things like BPA leads to obesity and diabetes and other chemical exposures are everywhere (of course-parents should NOT be giving their kids bottled water anyway…).

Long before children arrive at school and start to eat school lunches they have been influenced by the parents eating behaviors. This means you.

As parents, we have to stop the cycle. Of course, first we have to recognize the problem, and studies have shown that some parents are having a problem accepting his or her child as being overweight.

Just in case you don’t believe me or think I’m being overly dramatic, this particular study adds additional evidence to the fact that parental obesity is driving childhood obesity statistics in the US off the worldwide charts.

Researchers looked at weight loss interventions for obese children that were at an average of 11.9 years old. They looked at factors that led to an inability to lose weight and one single factor stood out above all else.

Obese children in families where both parents had weight problems were 600% more likely to be unsuccessful.

600%

If you are a parent of an obese child and you yourself have weight issues, you owe it to your child to make the right decisions for yourself first. That means NOT running around stressing about making sure your child eats breakfast or dinner but skipping it yourself.

It means that your exercise is just as important as your child’s soccer or football practice.

It means understanding that the overwhelming stress from work is never worth teaching your children these same coping habits.

Make the decision right now for your family.