Did you know that 13% of SA kids under the age of five are overweight? “Nutrition is key to ensure a child’s healthy development. Encouraging kids to eat more veggies and fruits, ensuring their meals are as nutritious as possible, and incorporating diversified protein sources – including plant-based options – is very important, but can …

Did you know that 13% of SA kids under the age of five are overweight? “Nutrition is key to ensure a child’s healthy development. Encouraging kids to eat more veggies and fruits, ensuring their meals are as nutritious as possible, and incorporating diversified protein sources – including plant-based options – is very important, but can sometimes prove challenging for parents and caregivers” says Zumi Njongwe, Consumer Communication, and Marketing Excellence Director, Nestlé ESAR.

There is a general misconception that eating healthy is expensive, but try following these budget-friendly tips on your next grocery shopping trip:  

Plan meals ahead

Go through recipe books and browse your favourite food blogs to create a meal plan that fits your household budget. Aim for a week’s worth of recipes that use up all the ingredients you buy so nothing goes to waste.

Make a list and stick to it

Check your fridge and pantry cupboard to see what ingredients you already have for your weekly meal plan. If there are items that are going to expire soon, work those into your meal plan to further minimise wastage. If you’re not good at making lists and sticking to them, take a look at these helpful apps.  

Find affordable alternatives

Take a look at your last grocery trip till slip and look for the most expensive items and research cheaper (but still healthy) alternatives. For example, quinoa is all the buzz, but it’s really expensive so opt for something like brown rice instead or use grapes instead of blueberries. This will help you keep within your budget. If you need help with your budget try these free budgeting templates.  

Have an in-store plan of action

Once you’re in the store, stick to the aisles in which you’ll find your listed items. This will help you avoid adding unnecessary things to your trolley, which you’ll probably look at later and wonder: ‘why on earth did I buy this?’

Comparison is key

Don’t just grab the can or packet you see first. Stores lay out their shelves with the priciest items at eye level, so check above and below for the same product at a more competitive price. Also, avoid being seduced by brand names. The store’s own nameless brands are sometimes a lot cheaper and, often, excellent quality.

Nutritional labels don’t lie

Some things that appear healthy, aren’t. For example, tinned soup may seem like a quick and healthy meal but in fact, many of these are packed with sugar and preservatives. Also skip ready-made meals where you have no control over the amount of salt, sugar, and preservatives added and which are normally very expensive.

Start them slow

A mistake people often make when deciding to ‘become healthy’ is buying huge quantities of healthy food, most of which end up going to waste. Rather buy and prepare small quantities to see what your kids enjoy most. Training your kids’ palate from a young age, to appreciate healthy food will help them establish a lifelong appetite for eating well.

Maintain and sustain normal eating patterns

The increase in childhood obesity can be partly attributed to the decrease in structured eating patterns. Eating breakfast is key to establishing these patterns, which will help them maintain a healthy weight throughout their lives. What they eat is, of course, just as important as when they eat, so avoid sugar-packed cereals and white bread.

Always have healthy snacks on hand

Buying or making snacks in bulk and keeping them on you will ensure that you’re always ready for that inevitable ‘I’m hungry’ when you’re on the go. This way you won’t have to buy convenience food at very inconvenient prices and you’ll keep them full until it’s home time and they can have a proper, filling meal.  

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Childhood obesity is a serious medical condition that is affecting adolescents and children alike across the globe and is common in India to. Obese children have bigger builds for their age. Among the reasons for the condition heredity/genes, developmental influences and environmental factors top the list.

According to a study, India has the second highest number of obese children in the world with 14.4 million reported cases. Some factors that have contributed to this is the replacement of home-cooked tiffins with canteen food, aggressive advertising by processed food and beverage brands, as well as a societal shift to screen time instead of actual physical play time.

If not controlled, childhood obesity can increase the risk of hypertension, osteoarthritis, elevated cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, respiratory problems, and so on. Beyond this, obesity also hampers a child’s overall development and contributes to lowered self-esteem and depression. Every two in three obese children will remain obese as adults and are at a greater risk of developing adult lifestyle diseases.

Children do what they see and adapt very quickly to their environment. So it’s important for parents to take the lead and help children incorporate healthier habits at the onset itself, when their child’s malleability scale is comparatively higher. Here are a few tips that will help parents manage a child’s obesity.

Promote nutritious and well-portioned meals

Children are often attracted to processed food, which have refined sugar, fats (especially trans fats) and salt. The consumption of this type of food can have side effects on weight and growth in the long run. It’s important for you to keep an eye on your child’s daily diet, both at home and outside.

A good way to start this is by ensuring that your child enjoys his/her meals and that it’s portioned appropriately for a single person. Incorporating food that is rich in protein and energy in the diet of a growing child is essential. Healthy eating includes consuming more fruit, vegetables, meat, wholegrains, eggs, and nuts like almonds.

It is also advised to limit the consumption of saturated fats and bad cholesterol and instead shift to unsaturated fats and energy-giving food. Timely meals also streamline the routine of the kids to eat when they are hungry and not bored.

Teach your child to snack right

Growing children tend to develop a higher appetite that makes them hungry frequently through the day. In a scenario like this, mothers can incorporate healthy snacking in their dietary habits instead of curbing hunger, which can hamper growth. Nuts, such as almonds, are a great replacement for unhealthy snacks as they may have satiating properties that promote feelings of fullness, which will help keep your kid full between meals and limit their appetite for fried, unhealthy snacks. You can also opt for fruits, oats, makhanas or fresh juices, and inculcate conscious snacking habits in your child from early on, as he/she is likely to follow it forever. This will not just help control weight, but also help in leading a more nutritious and healthy lifestyle.

Let your child choose a form of exercise

Due to academic pressure and distractions caused by TV, mobile phones and video games, maintaining your child’s physical activity can be a challenge. However, a minimum of 60 minutes of physical activity a day is vital in leading a healthy and fit lifestyle. This need not be by making them jog every day or enrolling them at a gym — you can instead work with your child to understand his/her interests and accordingly choose a form of exercise that he/she is likely to enjoy. Whether it’s mandatory playtime for 60 minutes in the park, choosing to learn a form of classical or modern dance, learning to play a sport or cycling — by making your kid join something he/she enjoys, physical activity will be something the child will be looking forward to. These activities will also help build strength and stamina.

Replace ‘screen time’ with ‘family time’

In the past two decades we have seen the influence and hold that technology has on us and how it impacts our daily choices. Television advertisements are aggressively used by brands to attract and persuade consumers for their commercial interests. These days, brands are actively directing marketing tools towards kids since they have the ability to drive indirect sales. In the process, kids are observing these products and developing a drive to own them.

Televisions, gaming rigs and smartphones collectively form roadblocks in the holistic development of children as they drive them away from physical activities and encourage a lazy ecosystem.

Children who spend more than four hours on these tools are more likely to be overweight, develop bad habits, show aggressive behaviour and fear that the world is scary and that something bad would happen to them. A good way to counter this is by setting limits on daily screen time, and instead replacing it with quality family time where parents and kids can come together and play games, talk about themselves, their day and also important news around them. Not only will this help restrict engagement and dependence on the screen, but it will also help kids to become more aware, alert and strengthen the parent-child relationship.

Avoid using food as a punishment or reward

For a lot of parents, food, especially sweets or snacks, become a form of punishment or reward for children. By positioning food as reward for a good deed, we set wrong expectations and unknowingly contribute in building an unhealthy emotional connection with food and feeling good. Beyond this, it also interferes with a child’s natural ability to regulate their eating which can have a negative impact over time. If you do this with your son/daughter, stop right away and instead reward them with things that would help in their growth, like a visit to the zoo, a play date with a friend or a special learning toy.

Support your child, no matter what

Your child’s obesity shouldn’t be a reason for you to feel embarrassed and what you feel or how you treat the issue will have a large impact on how they perceive themselves in the future. While you help them on their journey to a healthier lifestyle, do it for the right reasons — and try not to let materialistic nuances like beauty, or fitting into the ‘cooler’ types of clothes be the motivator here. How you deal with your child’s weight issues will define how he/she perceives himself/herself. Maintaining a positive and supportive approach is the most important and effective way to drive good results.

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We need to communicate to kids that their health, not a number on the scale, is what’s important

According to a new report recently released by the World Obesity Federation, obesity will affect more than 250 million kids by 2030. While media outlets and newsfeeds continuously remind us of the rising rates of childhood obesity—which have tripled in the past 20 years—far less attention has been paid to the complex solutions needed to address this problem.

It seems the obvious answer to the rising prevalence of childhood obesity would be to reduce calorie intake and increase physical activity. If calories out exceed calories in then weight loss is inevitable, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. And the hundreds of campaigns and interventions attempting to tackle childhood obesity are a testament of that. Take, for example, the large-scale WAVES study, which after a 12-month intervention across 54 schools, showed no differences between intervention and control schools in terms of improvements in students’ body mass index (BMI). School-based interventions may have little impact on obesity without broader societal and environmental efforts in place.

Initiatives to address childhood obesity may be further compromised by a lack of consideration to the underlying messages they send to children and families. Many approaches targeting obesity are based on the assumption that body weight is within personal control and that individuals have the ability to change their weight. We assume that change won’t occur unless individuals believe they have the power to change. For example, in schools, promoting beliefs about the controllability of intelligence have been shown to increase academic effort. And in the case of emotions, controllability has been associated with more positive emotion regulation.
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Body weight, however, is another story.

Instead of encouraging a mindset motivated to change, messages that perpetuate beliefs that obesity is within personal control can instead increase societal stigma and self-blame. Beyond blatant fat-shaming and pervasive negative portrayals of individuals with larger bodies in the media, seemingly innocuous messages can produce potent stigma. The Late Late Show host, James Cordon, recently described the harmful effects of fat shaming, and how a judgmental gaze intended to restrain eating would be enough to evoke feelings of shame and self-loathing.

By emphasizing behavioral control as a method of weight loss, we are simultaneously (and at times unintentionally) placing blame on individuals who struggle to lose weight. This blame becomes internalized, surfacing as a cascade of emotional, physiological and behavioral problems that can undermine physical and psychological health.

This fact is particularly worrisome given that youth of all body shapes and sizes are vulnerable to weight stigma. Over and above BMI, weight stigma is linked with low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, suicide ideation, low physical activity levels and depressive symptoms among adolescents. When youth are stigmatized, shamed or teased about their weight, they are more likely to engage in unhealthy eating behaviors, such as binge eating or high calorie consumption, avoid physical activity and gain weight—contributing to a vicious cycle of psychological distress, social withdrawal, unhealthy behaviors and weight gain.

So, it’s time to take a step back and look carefully at the messages being communicated in interventions to address childhood obesity. Fundamentally, messages should emphasize health and health behaviors, rather than body weight. We need to communicate to children that their health, not a number on the scale, is important.
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Reducing blame starts with raising awareness of the complex factors that contribute to body weight and the harmful consequences of weight stigma— in the media, the classroom, on the field, and at home. In addition to education, policies are needed to appropriately address weight-based mistreatment, such as school-based anti-bullying policies that adequately protect students in the face of weight-based bullying. And, finally, just as diversity surrounding other social stigmas, like those based on race/ethnicity or disability status, has proven effective in reducing stigma, increasing exposure to diverse bodies in positive ways will be critical to disrupting the harmful cycle of stigma.

While the issue of childhood obesity is complex public health priority, we must be certain that the messages we send serve to empower and support healthy behaviors among youth irrespective of body weight itself.

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‘Must make better use of open spaces’

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Obesity in children is associated with differences in brain structure in regions linked to cognitive control compared to the brains of children who are normal weight, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

However, the scientists who led the study stress that it is not possible to say whether obesity causes these brain changes or whether the children are obese because their brain structures are different.

Around 124 million children worldwide are thought to be obese. In the UK, almost one in five children are overweight or obese when they start primary school and this figure increases to one in three by the time they begin secondary school. Children who are overweight or obese are more likely to become obese adults, and have an increased risk of poorer health outcomes in later life including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Previous studies have linked being overweight with scoring lower on various measures of executive function, an umbrella term for several functions such as self-control, decision making, working memory (temporarily holding information for processing) and response to rewards. Broadly speaking, executive function refers to a set of processes that enable planning, problem solving, flexible reasoning and regulation of behaviours and emotions.

To examine if this link existed in children, researchers at the University of Cambridge and Yale University analysed data from 2,700 children between the ages of 9-11 years who had been recruited as part of the National Institutes of Health Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (NIH ABCD) Study. The results of their study are published today in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

In particular, the researchers looked at the thickness of the cortex, the outer layer of the brain—our so-called ‘grey matter’ – and compared it to each child’s body mass index (BMI). They also analysed results from tests of executive function.

The team found an association between increased BMI and significant reductions in the average (mean) thickness of the cortex, as well as thinning in the pre-frontal region of the cortex, an area associated with cognitive control. This relationship remained after accounting for factors including age, sex, race, parental education, household income and birth-weight.

The researchers also found that increased BMI was associated with poorer performance at tests to measure executive function.

“We saw very clear differences in brain structure between children who were obese and children who were a healthy weight,” says the study’s first author Dr. Lisa Ronan from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s important to stress that the data does not show changes over time, so we cannot say whether being obese has changed the structure of these children’s brain or whether innate differences in their brains lead them to become obese.”

The NIH ABCD Study will follow these children as they grow older and Dr. Ronan hopes this will enable them to see whether structural differences in the brain change over time and exactly how they relate to obesity. In particular, it may help them understand whether managing a child’s weight will make a difference to their executive function.

When the team used waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio as a measure of obesity, they found that these, too, were associated with reduced executive function, but the link between cortical thickness was more complicated, with some regions showed reduced thickness while others showed increased thickness.

“This unique and openly available dataset has allowed us to examine the relationships between brain structure, cognitive functions and body weight,” adds Professor Paul Fletcher, also at Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry. “The links that we observed suggest that there are very real structural brain and cognitive differences in children who are obese. The findings contribute a small part towards our growing understanding of the causes and consequences of obesity in children.”

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A new study suggests that high levels of sugar consumption in the 1970s and 80s may be responsible for the obesity epidemic among American adults today.

In other words, if high-sugar diets in childhood have long-lasting effects, the changes we see now in adult obesity rates may have started with diets decades ago, when those adults were children.

The findings are published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

“While most public health studies focus on current behaviors and diets, we took a novel approach and looked at how the diets we consumed in our childhood affect obesity levels now that we are adults,” said Dr. Alex Bentley, head of the University of Tennessee’s Department of Anthropology and lead researcher of the study.

Consumption of excess sugar, particularly in sugar-sweetened beverages, is a known contributor to both childhood and adult obesity. Many population health studies have identified sugar as a major factor in the obesity epidemic.

One problem with this theory, however, has been that sugar consumption in the U.S. began to decline in the late 1990s while obesity rates continued to rise well into the 2010s.

For example, by 2016, nearly 40 percent of all adults in the US, a little over 93 million people, were obese. In Tennessee alone, the adult obesity rate more than tripled, from about 11 percent in 1990 to almost 35 percent in 2016. By 2017, however, obesity in Tennessee had fallen 2 percent from the previous year.

“Since the 1970s, many available infant foods have been extremely high in sugar,” said Dr. Hillary Fouts, coauthor of the study and cultural anthropologist and professor in the UT Department of Child and Family Studies.

“Other independent studies in medicine and nutrition have suggested that sugar consumption during pregnancy can cause an increase in fat cells in children,” she added.

Dr. Damian Ruck, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anthropology and coauthor of the study says “Up to this point, no studies had explicitly explored the temporal delay between increased sugar consumption and rising obesity rates.”

For the study, the researchers modeled the increase in U.S. adult obesity since the 1990s as a legacy of the increased excess sugar consumption measured among children in the 1970s and 1980s.

They tested their model using national obesity data collected between 2004 and 1990 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They compared those obesity rates with annual sugar consumption since 1970 using the median per capita rates issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The model also roughly captures how obesity rates vary by age group among children and teenagers.

“Our results suggest that the dietary habits learned by children 30 or 40 years ago could explain the adult obesity crisis that emerged years later,” said Ruck.

A large portion of the sugar increase before 2000 was from high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which after 1970 quickly become the main sweetener in soft drinks and a common ingredient in processed foods. At peak sugar consumption, in 1999, each person in the US consumed on average around 60 pounds of HFCS per year and more than 400 calories per day in total excess sugars.

U.S. sugar consumption has declined since 2000. “If 2016 turns out to be the peak in the obesity rate,” Bentley said, “that is coincidentally one generation after the peak in excess sugar consumption.”

The team is planning to continue their research by exploring the effects of sugar-sweetened beverages. “This is important because obesity disproportionately affects the poor,” said Bentley.

In a paper published in Palgrave Communications in 2018, Bentley and his colleagues found that the relationship between low income and high rates of obesity became noticeable on a national scale in the early 1990s. The 2018 study shows that the correlation between household income and obesity rate has grown steadily, from virtually no correlation in 1990 to a very strong correlation by 2016.

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Sugar is often stated as the causal factor contributing to obesity. Sugar is mostly empty calories and excessive consumption of it can lead to increase in fat. That’s why we see many adults cutting back on sugary foods or giving them up altogether to stay fit. Children, however, are allowed to eat to their heart’s content without bothering about the amount of sugar intake. Of course, metabolism rate is high at a young age and it is digested easily without adding up to the body weight. But, what we don’t know is that the high-sugar foods eaten decades ago during childhood can show up much later in adulthood in the form of obesity.

According to a new study published by the researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, current obesity rates in adults in the United States could be the result of dietary changes that took place decades ago. The findings of the study were published in the journal ‘Science Direct’.

We always focus on present-day diet and eating behaviour to determine the bodily health and fitness level. This study took calculative steps in analysing earlier diet pattern during childhood and checked how it affected obesity levels years later.

Alex Bentley, head of UT’s Department of Anthropology and lead researcher of the study said, “U.S. diets were transformed, including the addition of sugars to industrially-processed foods. While excess sugar has often been implicated in the dramatic increase in U.S. adult obesity over the past 30 years, an unexplained question is why the increase in obesity took place many years after the increases in U.S. sugar consumption. To address this, here we explain adult obesity increase as the cumulative effect of increased sugar calories consumed over time.”

The researchers compared obesity rates with annual sugar consumption since 1970s till the year 2015. They noticed a sudden rise in adult obesity after 1990 that reflected the delayed effects of excessive sugar consumed among children of the 1970s and 1980s.

“In our model, which uses annual data on U.S. sugar consumption as the input variable, each age cohort inherits the obesity rate in the previous year plus a simple function of the mean excess sugar consumed in the current year,” Alex Bentley added.

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Data on childhood obesity and poverty will be gathered and analysed to tackle the problems as part of a Unicef project with the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish government.

The Data for Children Collaborative project, launched today, will aim to improve understanding of what can be done to address the issues and discover more about their precise causes.

Scientists in Edinburgh will look at a vast range of data, including what children are eating and their exercise habits, and how these are influenced by different settings and locations.

It is hoped the findings from Scotland – focusing on childhood obesity, poverty and population – can then be used across the world “to save time, money and lives”.

Globally, 40 million children under the age of five and 340 million between the ages of five and 18 are estimated to be obese, while 29 per cent of Scottish children are clinically overweight.

Lucinda Rivers, head of Unicef in Scotland, said: “Unicef’s mission is to drive better results for more children, but we can only do this by using the power of evidence to deliver a better understanding of some of the challenges they face.

“We are grateful to the Scottish government and the University of Edinburgh for supporting this ambition through their support of the Data for Children Collaborative.”

She added: “The world-leading data science and artificial intelligence capabilities now available to Unicef through this collaboration will help us achieve better results for more children.”

The data on children will be gathered from both the public and private sectors, with strict guidelines on how it can be used and shared.

Unicef delivery director Alex Hutchison said: “Each project has the potential to make a real, positive impact on children’s lives worldwide.

“Pairing insights with data enables us to better understand what is driving childhood obesity and child poverty, and more accurate population estimates will help develop a widely scalable approach to tackling hugely important issues.”

Kate Forbes, the Scottish government’s digital economy minister, said: “This is an innovative programme that will help to deliver new ways of tackling childhood obesity and child poverty, on a local, national and international scale.

“We are in a very strong position in Scotland to deliver this type of world-leading data analysis that helps to save time, money and lives.”

The minister added: “I am very excited about this collaboration, through partnering with organisations that share our vision for the role of data in improving the lives of children both in Scotland and globally.”

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London: Childhood obesity is on the rise and in order to tackle the issue London’s Child Obesity Taskforce has set out a number of measures that it will focus on reducing the number of overweight children and promote a healthy lifestyle, such as drinking plenty of water and being physically active.

According to the official data, nearly 40 per cent of London’s children aged 10 or 11 are either obese or overweight, reported TheMayor.eu.

The alarming statistics have pushed the UK’s capital to act upon the current situation. London mayor Sadiq Khan has specially assigned a Child Obesity Task Force for the issue.

Regarding childhood obesity, Khan said that “It’s shocking that our city has such high levels of child obesity and that our children’s health depends so much on who they are and where they live.” He noted that everyone has a “role to play” to tackle the health crises.

“We all have a role to play if we are to tackle this health crisis – so Londoners’ lives can be improved, reducing the burden on our overstretched health and care service. That’s why I’ve already set out proposals cracking down on takeaways near schools and increasing the number of water fountains in the capital,” Khan added.

The independent task force has set out 10 ambitions aimed at tackling the issue of childhood obesity, with calls to action including ending child poverty in the city, making free water more available, and restricting takeaway and fast-food restaurants, among many others.

The first of the ambitions is to put an end to child poverty in the city. The task force wants the Mayor to set out the minimum wage of the capital and for more businesses to start offering the “living wage”.

The plan has also envisioned steps focused at those looking after youngsters like providing support to women to breastfeed for longer by increasing the number of support groups for mothers and improving data on breastfeeding.

It also aims to create food training programmes for professionals like chefs and caterers working with children.

The plan also enlists the launch of a campaign aimed at supporting parents of young children.

Another ambition focuses on the things that children consume including making free water available everywhere around the city.

The task force also aims to restrict fast-food restaurants to sell products when unaccompanied children are likely to visit and offering companies incentives to do so.

The plan also focuses on harnessing the power of investment to create good food. The task force wants the city to create a good food investment fund which will help the producers in offering healthy options at decent prices.

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As the well-known adage goes, prevention is better than cure. Obesity in children has rapidly become one of the biggest dangers to the future generations. If one wants to work towards putting the brakes on this dangerous development the only way forward is to understand the symptoms and causes of it. There are a number of behavioral patterns, habits and other indications that are exhibited by children which can point to them becoming overweight.

Here are a few that you should be on the lookout for:

● Familial
Childhood obesity has been found most prevalent in parents, one or both of which are overweight. The Prader-Willi Syndrome is a complex genetic condition, which may result in a child becoming obese, and this could also be hereditary. However, in families, parents pass on their bad habits on to their children thus resulting in an overweight child. Studies show that children with overweight or obese parents are 10 to 12 times more likely to be overweight or obese themselves. Thus, it becomes imperative for parents to strive to be healthier for the sake of their children. It is all about inculcating the right habits, habits that will ensure that one does not become obese or overweight.

● Sleep Apnea
Poor sleeping patterns have been identified as being one of the biggest symptoms of obesity. Research indicates that over 60% of obese children are diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. This conditions reduces the tone of the airway musculature, which causes pauses in the breathing of the child. These pauses can last for up to 10 to 15 seconds. This condition is characterised by snoring and frequent sleep disruption. Repetitive Obstructive Sleep Apnea is an independent risk factor that affects metabolic syndrome and several of its components, like dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular problems.

● Difficulty With Sudden Physical Activity
Children are naturally energetic and highly active. Running up a flight of stairs or chasing each other through the house is something that should come naturally to them. However, if you find your child not being able to cope with these sudden physical activities, or faces shortness of breath, or gets tired too easily, there something may be ailing them. Different children carry different amount of body weight about them as they grow. It may not be apparent if they are overweight by simply looking at them. It is ideal that in such a situation you seek out medical help and find out if your child is suffering from weight issues.

● Appearance
The most telltale markers of obesity are stretch marks on hips and abdomen. It can cause the formation of dark velvety skin called acanthosis nigricans around the neck and other areas. It can also be a problem when there is a deposit of fatty tissue around the breast area. These are some of the most important physical markers for a child being overweight or obese. These factors do not always manifest but one should always be wary if they do as they could point to serious health hazards.

● Panic Eating
If you find that your child always eats under stress take this as a sign of not only a serious mental issues but also that of being overweight. The diet of a child needs to be monitored carefully and they should be not only getting balanced meals but also plenty of exercise. Any unhealthy eating habits, like binge eating or eating when sad or anxious should be carefully examined and treated.

● Listlessness
A child that is overweight or dealing with weight problems will often find themselves facing a lack of energy. They will not only be physically inactive but also listless and often depressed. Talk to your child when you see this symptom manifesting and get them medical help at the earliest. These issues may also arise because of external factors like teasing at school or even serious criticism they face at home.

There are a number of ways that you can help manage a child’s weight, and Skooc does just that for your child. Its comprehensive practice of imparting behavioral change has been proven apt in dealing with obesity.

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SYDNEY, July 19 (Xinhua) — A study released on Friday by Australia’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute has attempted to tackle problematic snacking by finding out which factors contribute to overeating.

It is not surprising that snacking has become a major contributor to childhood obesity. Given the opportunity, most kids would happily shovel handfuls of chips and chocolate into their mouths between meals, whether out of hunger or boredom or both.

Lead researcher Dr. Jessica Kerr told Xinhua that contrary to common advice, the size of the container or dish in which snacks are served held little influence, while the amount of food with which is presented plays a major role.

The study looked at roughly 1,800 children aged 11-12 who were taking part in a larger study – giving them 15-minute snack breaks in between 20 other health assessments.

“What we found in this study was that children were really significantly affected by how much food they were served, so when we gave them more items and more choice, they consumed a lot more,” Kerr said.

“But surprisingly, the size of the dish wear, so the presentation of the foods, didn’t have much of an effect and I say that’s surprising because it is widely recommended that we use smaller plates for portion control, but our study actually didn’t seem to find that the way foods were presented had a big effect.”

Australia’s childhood obesity rate has ballooned to as much as three times that of thirty years ago, with one in five children now considered overweight or obese.

As a contributing factor in this Kerr believes that snacking has been overlooked in the past when it came to scientific studies.

She said that parents should pay more attention towards offering children smaller amounts of food and, specifically, fewer and less variety of energy-dense foods and pre-packaged items.

“Unfortunately manufacturers do make unhealthy things taste delicious, sodium rich rice crackers for example or chocolate or really high sugary muesli bars,” Kerr said.

“But you can do fun things for kids with fruit and vegetables as well and plain rice crackers and plain popcorn and things like that, there’s nothing wrong with those things.”

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