Obesity the Childhood Epidemic

Obesity the Childhood Epidemic
By; David Bemis

      Obesity has become an epidemic in the US. Some of the obese adolescents today will lose limbs and vital digits when they're in there 30’s due to type 2 diabetes which main cause is obesity. In the next ten years 45% of children will be insulin dependant. 822 people die everyday in the US due to obesity. All of this can be stopped.

The cause of obesity is eating high calorie high fat, and high sugar food with little or no exercise. Often big food corporations will put lovable characters such as shrek on boxes of  unhealthy food. These characters will also be in health food commercials or in a public service announcements (PSA) so kids think if shrek tells me to eat healthy and he’s on a box of Coco Puffs then coco puffs are healthy. This ideally would hook kids at a young age for life and will get them to eat unhealthy food and think it’s healthy. An example of this is when the government made a psa shrek, donkey, and puss in boots were in it telling kids to eat healthy.  Shrek said this in the PSA, “eat healthy like me”.This will make kids think that if Shrek is on a box of something then it must be healthy because he is healthy. However Shrek alone is also advertised McDonalds, Twinkies, Frosted Flakes, Ding Dongs, Ice Cream, Frozen Waffles, Brownies, Soda, Cake, Cookie, CoCo Puffs, ect.This is why T.V is also an extremely big part of obesity. Four in five ads on T.V during Saturday morning cartoons are junk food ads. The commercials will usually be of a child doing something boring, like homework, and then Ronald McDonald will come in and he will make everything happy and fun. This make kids think that if they eat McDonalds then this will happen to them. T.V ads like this makes kids want to buy all the junk food. T.V also keeps kids from exercising often. The average american child watches three hours of T.V a day. It will be bed time by the time a child has done their homework, had dinner, and watch 3 hours of T.V.

All of these things must change if we are to stop the obesity crisis. Children shouldn’t be watching this much T.V, child directed advertising should be monitored, and we must get better food for our children. Plus, the biggest one of all children need to  exercise more.

Word count: 426

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