By: Anissa Muhammad, MPH, M.S.
When medical and public health officials and media outlets report on obesity in America and how it contributes to chronic illnesses, they only report on adults. The number of children and adolescents who have been diagnosed with obesity is very seldom mentioned. This is interesting considering the number of children and adolescents who are categorized as obese.
For the years 2017-2018, of the 14.4 million children and adolescents in the U.S., 19.3% (2,779,200) of them obese (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2021). In California, 40.1% of 5th grade students are obese; 38.2% of 7th grade students are obese; and 36.1% of 9th grade students are obese (Healthy Beginnings 2021). Statistics indicate that obese youth either have, or are pre-diabetic, which means our youth are at a greater risk of having type 2 diabetes, heart disease, chronic kidney disease, high blood pressure, and joint problems by the time they are 30-35 years old. While some social determinants of obesity and its associated chronic illnesses (listed above) e.g., poverty, socio-economic status, fast food, and lack of exercise, the primary culprits are health and nutritional literacy.
Health literacy is defined as “an individual’s capacity to understand basic health information needed to make good health decisions. Nutritional literacy is similar; “an individual’s ability to understand basic information about diet and nutrition. More often than not, consumers look at nutrition labels, but few fully understand the content on the label. Truthfully, most items that have nutrition labels are not nutritious foods: candy, cookies, crackers, etc. In fact, most consumers buy packaged items on store shelves and it’s not ‘real’ food—they are food products. Let me explain. The ingredients in a box of Cheerios are whole grain oats (really oat dust), corn starch (GMO corn unless otherwise stated) sugar, honey, brown sugar, oat bran, (synthetic) vitamin E, salt, and tripotassium phosphate (a cleaning agent, used in small amounts to adjust the acidity of the mixture when making the cereal). Tripostassium phosphate was deemed harmful by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2011—and we are feeding this to our children (and ourselves), unaware of the harm to our health it causes. Good taste cannot replace good health. In the Bible, the prophet Hosea, 4:6 said,” our people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge.”
We must arm ourselves with knowledge, wisdom and understanding so that we can prevent the effects of obesity and chronic illnesses caused by eating the wrong foods.
See you next month! 😊
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). Childhood Obesity Facts: Prevalence of Childhood Obesity in the U.S. Date retrieved March 20, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html#:~:text=Prevalence%20of%20Childhood%20Obesity%20in%20the%20United%20States&text=The%20prevalence%20of%20obesity%20was,to%2019%2Dyear%2Dolds.
Let’s Get Healthy California. (2021, December 15). Healthy Beginnings/Reducing Childhood Obesity. Date retrieved March 20, 2022. https://letsgethealthy.ca.gov/goals/healthy-beginnings/reducing-childhood-obesity/
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