How to fight Obesity among kids?

If you randomly look at the kids coming out of school buses in any city, you are likely to find more oversized girls and boys in skirts and shorts than normal ones. Dr Abraham Paul, a renowned paediatrician in Kochi warns that rising obesity poses huge health risks later on in life including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other life style diseases. In a recent interaction titled 'Know Your Child' with parents of Rajagiri Public School, he underscored the need to be vigilant against health hazards, learning disorders and inability to adjust with daily challenges that growing kids may face in the modern era.

I remember in my childhood days after a hard days study at school, we would come home, have some thing to eat and then straight away go to play—it could be badminton, cricket, kho-kho, or a game called ‘seventies’ or just run around catching each other. All the fancy fried foods now available in bakeries and super markets were unheard of those days. Obesity at that time may have been confined to less than five percent of the kids and that too because of genetic or hereditary factors than lack of physical activity.

Dr Abraham K Paul said that colas, samosas, burgers, fried foods, biscuits are all high calorie stuff that require heavy physical exercise to burn it out. For example, a samosa may require one hour cycling to burn the energy generated while 3 biscuits at a time would require one hour of swimming to neutralize it.

Good food habits: Start Early
Dr Abraham Paul warns that undesirable food habits are learned from early childhood when parents try to force feed a child who refuses to eat. He advises parents to introduce vegetables, fruits and cereals at the age of nine months to one year. A child may not agree to eating fruits or vegetables at higher ages say, five, seven or ten if he or she hasn’t introduced to such food by the age of one. Parents have a tendency to force feed a child who refuses to eat there by creating stress. Slowly, the child learns to eat whenever it is stressed, thereby causing fat build up in the body.

In infant years, parents have a tendency to grind five or six food items into a paste and then push it in their throat. This will only lead to the child not getting a sense of taste for food and ability to chew food properly.

The rapid decline of play area, more emphasis on class room learning, more time in front of television while munching fried snacks all add to the unnecessary fat build up in kids, according to Dr Abraham Paul.  He suggests schools should provide four hours of physical activity every week and they should maintain a height, weight chart and look for obesity signals in children to initiate remedial action.

In many play schools and kindergarten, milk and biscuits are provided as snacks during first break in the morning and in the afternoon. This becomes habit forming and lead to fondness for refined food which are unhealthy because of preservatives, oil content and fat.

My daughter Diyah had the habit of asking for biscuits every day and now I told her about Dr Abraham Paul’s advice and atleast for a day she didn’t ask for new biscuits. We are not sure when she goes to another house, she may be offered biscuits and might eat.

The Solution
In the absence of play area and physical activity, kids can be prevented from becoming obese by avoiding calorie rich junk food and reduce TV watching. They could also be provided opportunities in indoor play, learning music, encouraging reading and so on.

Let’s not make  promising citizens of tomorrow end up popping pills, using insulin or going for early cardiac surgeries. Time to act is NOW.
(Please mail your suggestions/comments to sreekumsree@gmail.com or post it here itself)