The Many Hazards of Childhood Obesity
It hasn’t been so long since obesity was limited to the world of adulthood. Over the last thirtyish years or so the situation in the US has changed definitely for the worse. In addition to more adults being overweight, children and teenagers are developing this condition at ever younger years. For children, the obvious and most influential people will be the parents, and education as well as awareness are critical. It is, however, the parents who must offer guidance and act as positive role models. Obese kids are staring down the barrel of a plethora of physical and behavioral health problems. Looking beyond that, the kids are also at high risk for lots of issues that won’t surface until later on. So for kids it is a terrible one-two punch that is nearly impossible to beat and overcome.
The child who is obese is on a crushing path heading right for awful health problems. One problem, for example, is fatty liver disease (which is just about the most common liver disease). Very many years ago people usually associated liver problems with alcoholism and sclerosis of the liver. Now, though, we understand that chronic obesity is a major factor in fatty liver disease. What will usually make the primary liver issues worse is that the metabolism of an obese person is terribly dysfunctional. Your liver helps things more by acting as the detoxifying agent to rid your body of anything that is not good for it. So there is just an incredible demand and load that is placed on the systems of kids and teens who are obese. Medical research has been done all over the world that says that obese children are more likely to suffer from sleep apnea. This specific condition is quite serious because what happens is that the child’s airway gets blocked when he or she is asleep. Kids who are overweight and obese are more likely to snore too but, according to researchers, that is actually deceiving. It’s also possible that the snoring is a symptom of something called OSA or obstructive sleep apnea. One possible approach to the problem is a procedure called an adenotonsillectomy which is meant to treat the condition specifically in young people.
Part and parcel with the constant bullying and feelings of being ostracized they encounter at school, kids who suffer from obesity are just about guaranteed to develop some form of social dysfunction. Another term people use is “social disabilities” which come with a high degree of high levels of unhappiness, depression, etc. These result in extreme stress levels which are widely known to cause problems both psychologically and physically. Curiously this means that some kids will become bullies themselves. What is obviously happening here is that the bullying behavior is an outlet for the anger that they have been feeling building up from being picked on themselves. Obese kids and young adults have often been (accurately) described as “the walking wounded.” This applies because of the way that obesity affects the mind and the body.