I need feedback on this essay. Please state 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses If you don't mind.
Our Children's Health Matters!
Childhood obesity is primarily due to a lack of education in our schools and homes, plus the lifestyle choices which predominate our younger generations. The cases of childhood obesity are steadily increasing each year as the availability of high-quality nutritional options and educational emphasis on nutrition decreases. The proliferation of advertising by the fast-food industry has emphasized low-cost and convenience over quality. These three factors: the lack of high-quality options, a decreased attention on nutritional education and a promotion of convenience and low cost over quality through advertising have directly led to decreased lifespans in younger generations and an increase in health and behavioral issues related to poor nutrition.
In the 1950's processed foods began to make its way into our homes, schools and restaurants due to our home life prioritizes shifting, with woman entering in the work force, which caused households to start looking for alternatives of convenience at meal time. (Elson Hass, MD) This allowed the food industry to capitalize on the changing culture; they began to advertise to the families through technology and billboards package foods and began placing it on the store shelves. This made it easy for women of households to still be able to prepare a similar type of homemade food for their families when time was limited due to working, the packaged processed food served its purpose. Due to the time constraint and the convivence of this new type of homecooked meal, it led to obesity which has now become an epidemic. The calorie intake that is consumed with package processed products consumed by our children is causing them to gain more fat because of the ingredients consist more of sugar, carbohydrates and proteins that are full of antibiotics and hormones. Today we are seeing even more of increase of intake in calories with our children with fast food restaurants provided on every corner and in our school's cafeterias. Time and convenience have become the food industries pay check, when it comes to exposing families to processed food due to our changes in lifestyle.
It has been proven each generation that is born now seems to have more health risks and changes they adapt to due to nutritional choices. Why is nutrition becoming the reason for the obesity epidemic in our lives? And why isn't there more changes being made to increase our livelihood and longevity, is money the real evil of our nutritional future?
As I continue to research why childhood obesity is on the rises, it points in many directions, one being government, advertising, schools, home life and corporations. Each entity has their own reason to continue to fuel the food industry with foods that aren't beneficial for health purposes but are profitable due to the quantity of the demand. Our government is capitalizing on this financial growth and are controlling the nutritional lifestyle by regulating education in the schools, by telling our children what their daily calorie intake and food plates consumption should consist of. Then there is the food industry that states the government should not have any impact on our children's lives and be able to regulate health food decisions.
The school industries are funded by the government and the government is in control of the regulations and guidelines of how consumers should eat, by providing a balance nutritional pyramid which consist of five major food groups. The MyPlate.gov, guild was published by the USDA and is provided in all our schools, but we still seem to have an obesity epidemic among children higher then ever before. The education provided in the schools is not changing the mindset and the out look of what our children decide to eat. It is educating them to eat in categories if they want to be health, not education of quantity and quality. If schools want children to understand the relevance of the reasoning behind why this guild was started, they need to educate them on both the logical and emotional level and help them understand why it is so important to eat health. This is not happening, instead, we continue to stock pile the schools with sugar, carbohydrates, processed food and tell them to dig in.
The school cafeterias provided food to our children that continues to remain unhealthy, but one could argue that it still fits the MyPlate guild lines by providing fruits, grains, vegetables, protein and dairy. Is there any research provided with the nutritional value to educate the children or parents as of what their children are being feed in these meal packs? As a mother's I have witnessed firsthand the food consistence our children are being feed. It is sugar, processed foods and dairy that contains hormones and chemicals to our children. The fruit cups have syrup full of sugar, the vegetables are usually welted, and the protein is factory made meat. How is this healthy for our children to eat? If you look at the sugar intake, carbohydrates and calories of each one of the school lunches it goes over the recommended daily 2000 calories, we are told to stay under the daily recommend calories to keep healthy and maintain a healthy weight. So, again is the food in our schools providing the nutritional experience our children need to be able to stay health and consistent to the designed benefits the USDA Center for Nutrition recommends with their, pyramid of food groups? The pyramid was design to give a general lay out of what to eat, but what it doesn't do is give you types of foods in each category to be able to plan your meals around the healthy amount needed each day to stay away from health risks of over eating and diseases. Our children do not have the education to realize what they are eating and why it isn't good for them, they just know that they are eat their fruits, vegetables and meat. Pizza always offers those three items, so they must be doing it right. The schools don't feel they are at fault because they are doing their due diligence to make sure they are following the governments guidelines, so do we look at our homes and see how the parents are handling children's nutritional health?
The parents have had the fingers pointed at them and taken the blame for their child becoming obese, due to the changes in family meals and activity of lifestyles in their home. However, schools continue to take a part of the epidemic as well. The physical education and lunch programs have changed so much over the years due to budget, that children aren't getting nutrition that lower the obesity rate or physical education that allows children to burn off their meals through out the day. Schools now have physical education as an elective for kids, they are expected to take at least 2 quarters through out the year, if they are not playing an after-school sport. This teaches children that physical activity isn't as important. Instead the focus now is teaching computer skills to learn coding or playing on the internet to build games for their future education and careers. Which don't get me wrong, planning for a career is important, but being healthy to live long enough to be successful is just as important. If we continue to provide our children the excuse not to work out, go outside, be active, enjoy the fresh air, then why would they? School's need to be more involved with creating a balanced curriculum that encourages our children to be more active again as well as plan for their futures.
As the schools choose to provide meals inside of the cafeterias for lunch hour, they are more focusing on the USDA plate that was created by the government to balance and create structure with in the dietary meal guidelines. The problem that we are still finding is the balance between junk food and sugar soft drinks are still more popular in the school then the chosen diet provided for them. Kids are not being taught portion control school and home life now days is so busy that children are able to consume more sugar then before, therefore we are seeing more diabetes within our children.
Sugars from beverages and junk food has become a problem because of balance and quantity. Individuals are not limiting their selves to just one soda a day or one candy bar a day, its as much as they want because no one is telling them any difference. It's alarming to see the rate of snacks has quadrupled in the last 10 years because of cravings and lack of education of how calories in and out works in our body. Sugar isn't only in our sodas and candy bars, it's in anything made by man or packaged and put on the shelves, so, the more we eat, the more sugar we take in, the bigger we get. (Elson Hass, MD).
Why are so many children being diagnosed with diabetes these days, recent studies show that approximately 208,000 children under age of 20. diabetes.org In recent years, type 2 diabetes, a chronic disease closely linked with obesity, has been on the rise among children and adolescents as the prevalence of obesity in US youth has increased. Prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes depend on weight management, which can be particularly difficult in a child's world of food advertising, video games, and pocket money for candy bars.
Parenting a child does not come with a hand book, we aren't taught exactly how to care for our child's needs as they continue to grow up from infant to adulthood. We try to take our own life experiences and those around us to figure out what we need to do to make sure they are health, educated and a roof over their heads. The problem is times have changed and how we fed our children. When we were children, we ate an American diet that provided all the nutrition we needed to thrive and be healthy. We would go outside and play till the street lights came on, that's when we knew it was dinner time. Now, that same American diet and lack of physical education is killing our children in their early years with heart disease and causing diabetes. Our parents worked, we went to school and a home cooked meal was place on our table and sack lunch was provided during the day. These days, that isn't the case. As parents we are running around with our children trying to get to this activity to that activity. We don't allow ourselves enough time in the day to take care of ourselves, let alone what our children's true nutrition needs are. We run through the drive through before the next errand on our list or on the way home because it's to late to cook and everyone is tired. We as parents need to stop and take a breath and begin to look around and education ourselves on what's best for us and our family when it comes to eating, no one else is going to do it. In fact, the outside world is going to continue to advertise unhealthy foods containing sugar, sodium and calories. We need to be the change, there are many ways to educate ourselves by taking a local cooking class, a nutrition class through the college or look online to find out ways to plan a head to make sure your families our feed health through out the week. Something must change, and the change needs to begin in our homes and with the parents recognizing that running through McDonald's every day is 1500 calories in one sitting, when the daily allowance, states we should only eat 2000 calories a day and find at least 50 minutes of activity to follow that through out the day.
Obesity has been linked to children due to the billions of dollars a year spent by big corporations, government and advertising companies to influence our children's unhealthy food consumption. This then causes a social influence with in our schools and around the friends of children. Many individual's will generally eat for seven different reasons: habit, social interactions, availability, positive or negative associations, emotions values, body weight and health benefits.
The advertising industry is counting on us to continue with our fast paced, habit forming mindsets that continually don't take to care for ourselves. This way they can use these seven reasons to catch our attention when they are advertising, in the restaurants on the TV screens above you, your child's cartoon shows in the mornings, video games and computer advertisements we are always in front of. The companies are aware that next time you take your child to go grocery shopping they have influenced their minds to have you buy a product she saw on tv or her friends have at school in their lunches or popped up on the computer screen when playing fortnite. The cycle doesn't stop, corporations know that forty eight percent of diets fail because individuals give into temptation, especially if it's constantly in front of them through advertisement. The grocery stores make sure to set up their aisles conveniently enough for all the sugary food, candy and soda to be placed at eye level as you walk in and around the store. This is how they keep our obesity rate up when it comes to our children. Obesity has increased the more hours our children watch television, listen to music with ads and play video games.
The obesity rate continues to increase on a yearly basis, which has caused it to be classified as an epidemic and so is diabetes. Ten years ago, it was unheard of, of a child under the age of ten have type two diabetes and having to go on medication to correct it. It has always been considered the adult-only condition because we weren't eating health or taking care of our bodies. Type 2 diabetes can be prevented in our children if we maintained a healthy weight, stayed active and limit sugary food and drinks. The question is how will this be accomplished in each house hold?
Diabetes isn't the only health risk involved with children eating a unhealth diet, more and more we are learning about mental illness that has been such a stigma to talk about. The more research that is being done on illnesses like bipolar, ADHD, Asperger's/Autism and other psychosis illness, they are uncovering the fact that nutrition does play a big part of how the mind works and as well as the medication that is being prescribe for the individual. Obesity is being used as an excuse for doctors to take the blame off the prescription they are given to children for these illnesses. Many kids tend to have cravings that are uncontrollable due to medication, in turn makes them obese. The more we are learning the more we are seeing that with the right nutrition for children some of the illness are being decreased in consistency and helping with symptoms when they do have an episode. Instead of causing our child to become obese and medicated, we also need to look at this spectrum of the health industry. I bring this up because, I have a son that was diagnosed with Asperger's and ADHS, the first thing they did was put him on medication that made his weight triple. Now he is told he is obese and needs to watch what he eats, when the fact is the medicine is what caused it, now we must change his nutrition and he does struggle with cravings and the habits created when he ate when he was on medication. Again, Obesity is caused by many different lifestyle situations, we can't just point the finger at one person or one company.
Our children deserve better then what this generational lifestyle continues to offer them. We as parents need to focus on what's important and how to make changes in our lives and their lives to make a difference daily. Our voices matter and if we start to use them to be advocates for our children then corporations, governments, doctors and schools will need to listen. We need to demand change, but with that being said we need to request the right changes that will allow for our children to benefit with not being a statistic of this epidemic and at the same time allowing corporate America to still feel as though we aren't trying to take all of their profits away, we just want a healthy change. Other countries outside of America has asked for changes and have received them. So why are we getting the unhealthy food and sending countries like Australia and Europe better foods then we feed our children?
We need to request for our food chains to ban advertisement from our television during certain hours of the day. This way we know our children aren't watching cartoons and being taught to ask for fast food or sugar foods every time we are at a store or pass by McDonalds.
It important for us to lobby our schools and start requesting for daily exercise activities for all of students no matter what age or grade. We also need to request that our schools to start serving only healthy food, no processed food and no sugar drinks or vending machines. As a kid in high school, I was against them taking out our vending machines but now I understand why it was done. It needs to change again and we need to take them out of our schools. The schools also need to start educating what unhealthy eating looks like to our children as well, so they can make a logical decision on what foods to put into their systems.
Our government also needs to start educating not only what the five food groups are, but the importance of why we need them. If they are going to be involved, they should have to share the positives and negatives of what an effective diet or health diet plan looks like. Just providing a diagram of a pyramid isn't helping our obesity rate.
Obesity is truly an epidemic; our children are being affect by it due to lack of education in our homes and schools. We need to build an urgency of why a high-quality nutritional diet is so imperative for everyone to prescribe too. We must change our advertising style, educate our families and promote healthier food and living to help keep our kids generation risk free of disease and obesity due to bad nutrition.