Free Essays:

Health and Obesity:

Health is becoming a matter of grave concern, especially the health of teenagers and adolescents, who are becoming increasingly overweight and obese. Obesity is now being regarded as an epidemic by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2000) due to the increasing occurrence of obesity among children and young adults. Studies confirm that obesity and other health problems related to health among adolescents are on the constant rise in America with fewer than five percent of adolescents being overweight in the mid 1960s (Ogden, Flegal, Carroll and Johnson, 2002) which increased to seventeen percent within a span of four decades (Ogden et al., 2006). The CDC reports that about 16 to 33 percent of children and adolescents in America are overweight and obese, with fewer than fifty percent of adolescents engaging in regular physical activities. Obesity is believed to the primary cause of chronic disease in later life due to the chronic diseases caused due to obesity.
The average hours of television viewing activities among adolescents between the ages fourteen to eighteen years was found to be above 28 hours per week, which could have influenced the elevation in obesity among adolescents (Roberts, Foehr and Rideout, 2005). Activities like watching television and playing video games reduces physical activity among children and exposes them to advertisements about fast foods which have an unhealthy impact on the perception and desire of foods which are unhealthy and promote gain of weight, increasing the chances of obesity (Barr-Anderson et. al., 2009)..