"Obesity is considered the most common dietary crisis faced by a lot of Americans today. Many children face emotional and psychological effects. Children feel shame about being overweight or obese that can negatively impact their school work and their social standing.
Kids who are unhappy with their weight may be more likely than average-weight kids to develop unhealthy eating habits and they may be more prone to depression, as well as substance abuse."
I have noticed that the way children grow in society has a lot to do with how their parents, family and friends eat, which is the ways they choose to eat. Sometimes obesity can be stopped, but other times it has to do with a child's genetic makeup. There are ways for children to not end up like the rest of America's obese society. America is now the capital of obesity.
he original article is posted below
This article addresses various aspects of common knowledge that are known about childhood obesity. Americans are fatter than ever, and it is a major strain on our health care system (Diabetes, Heart Disease). With advances in modern medicine, we can keep these people alive, but their quality of life is really not what it could be. We are inundated with media images concerning people who have lost weight or are trying to lose it (e.g., Biggest Loser), but despite the popularity of these shows obesity continues to be an American epidemic.
What do most of us know for sure? It's unhealthy (Type-II diabetes is the main issue I can think of), it has a variety of underlying causes (poor nutrition, lack of exercise, some genetic influence, social influence), and it can be emotionally damaging. The question then is why isn't the emotional damage combined with health risks enough to motivate people to lose weight when there is seemingly no positive outcome to being overweight? When I thought of this question the first thing that came to my mind was this video from Austin Powers (Warning: if you don't like this type of humor, don't watch the video, but I thought it illustrates what I am getting at. Oh and Fast forward to 1:24 to see the part I'm referring to.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUqJUH55zxQ&feature=related
Of course, the character portrayed in this clip is meant to be humorously over the top, but nonetheless it illustrates an interesting point. People may be unhappy as a result of being overweight or obese, but then they deal with this emotion by eating more, which makes them more unhappy and so on and so forth. There are research articles to support this theory. I found one of particular interest. "Association of eating behaviors and obesity with psychosocial and familial influences" by Brown, Schiraldi, and Wrobleski (I would include URL but I found this through the library website using a basic article search, so I don't think the link would work without signing into your library account). The basic findings of the article by Brown et al. were that emotional eating was generally positively related to having a family member offer food for comfort, parental emotional eating, anxiety, depression, and stress. Emotional eating was also negatively related to optimism, self esteem and resilience. Family offered food for comfort seemed to have the most impact on emotional eating. This would suggest that emotional eating is generally a learned behavior. Other than being a learned behavior, I was wondering how emotional eating relates directly to stress.
The article "Emotions and eating. Self-reported and experimentally induced changes in food intake under stress" by Wallis and Wetherington suggests that emotional eating might do just that, but only in emotional over-eaters. Participants surveyed indicated that general stress influenced emotional eaters by making them more likely to overeat whereas non emotional eaters were more likely to under-eat when under stress. Then, with regard to a specific stressor, emotional eaters were more likely to overeat high fat snacks compared to non emotional eaters.
While these two articles provide evidence that people may learn how to be emotional eaters and also relate eating to stress, it is hard to say which comes first, learning to use food as comfort, or using it as comfort and then teaching others how to do so. Possibly there are physiological reasons for why people overeat in response to stress?