Childhood Obesity In Communities Research Articles

Raised Childhood Obesity and Its Consequences: Alarming Worldwide for Primordial Prevention

Childhood Obesity is defined as excess or abnormal increase of fat accumulation in the body. Early, developed countries were facing this childhood obesity but now it has moved to developing countries. According to World Health Organization (WHO), 39 million children under the age of 5 are obese and overweight in 2020 and 340 million adolescents and children aged between 5-19 were obese and overweight in 2016. According to Center for Disease Control, prevalence of obesity in United States was 19.3% and affected about 14.4 million adolescents and children in 2018. Moreover, in the adult population morbidity and mortality is increased in individuals who were overweight in adolescence, even if they lose the extra weight during adulthood. Diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, gastro intestinal disturbance, respiratory problems, orthopedic disorders once considered as adult problems now has become major health issue in children’s. Timely action must be initiated to combat the rising epidemic of childhood obesity and its consequences. However, by periodic surveillance on nutrition and childhood obesity in community, using various strategies at home and providing needy based intervention by schools care services, formulating and implementing structured policies will reduce the impact of childhood obesity worldwide.

Raised Childhood Obesity and Its Consequences: Alarming Worldwide for Primordial Prevention

Childhood Obesity is defined as excess or abnormal increase of fat accumulation in the body. Early, developed countries were facing this childhood obesity but now it has moved to developing countries. According to World Health Organization (WHO), 39 million children under the age of 5 are obese and overweight in 2020 and 340 million adolescents and children aged between 5-19 were obese and overweight in 2016. According to Center for Disease Control, prevalence of obesity in United States was 19.3% and affected about 14.4 million adolescents and children in 2018. Moreover, in the adult population morbidity and mortality is increased in individuals who were overweight in adolescence, even if they lose the extra weight during adulthood. Diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, gastro intestinal disturbance, respiratory problems, orthopedic disorders once considered as adult problems now has become major health issue in children’s. Timely action must be initiated to combat the rising epidemic of childhood obesity and its consequences. However, by periodic surveillance on nutrition and childhood obesity in community, using various strategies at home and providing needy based intervention by schools care services, formulating and implementing structured policies will reduce the impact of childhood obesity worldwide.

Community Organizing for Healthier Communities: Environmental and Policy Outcomes of a National Initiative.

Childhood obesity is disproportionately prevalent in communities of color, partially because of structural inequities in the social and built environment (e.g., poverty, food insecurity, pollution) that restrict healthy eating and active living. Community organizing is an underexamined, grassroots health promotion approach that empowers and mobilizes community residents to advocate for, and achieve, environmental and policy changes to rectify these structural inequities. This paper presents outcomes of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Communities Creating Healthy Environments initiative: the first national program to apply community organizing to combat childhood obesity-causing structural inequities in communities of color. Twenty-one community-based organizations and tribal nations (grantees) conducted 3-year community organizing-based interventions primarily designed to increase children's healthy food and safe recreational access. Grantees' policy wins (environmental and policy changes resulting from grantee interventions) were measured from 2009 to 2014 using semi-structured interviews conducted quarterly and 6 months post-grant, and independently coded and reviewed in 2015 by researchers and expert community organizers. The 21 grantees achieved 72 policy wins (mean=3.43, SD=1.78) across six domains: two directly addressed childhood obesity by enhancing children's healthy food (37.50%) and recreational access (33.33%), whereas four indirectly addressed obesity by promoting access to quality health care (8.33%); clean environments (9.73%); affordable housing (8.33%); and discrimination- and crime-free neighborhoods (2.78%). These findings provide compelling evidence that community organizing-based interventions designed and led by community stakeholders can achieve diverse environmental and policy solutions to the structural inequities that foment childhood obesity in communities of color.

Communities of Color Creating Healthy Environments to Combat Childhood Obesity.

Ethnic and racial health disparities present an enduring challenge to community-based health promotion, which rarely targets their underlying population-level determinants (e.g., poverty, food insecurity, health care inequity). We present a novel 3-lens prescription for using community organizing to treat these determinants in communities of color based on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Communities Creating Healthy Environments initiative, the first national project to combat childhood obesity in communities of color using community organizing strategies. The lenses--Social Justice, Culture-Place, and Organizational Capacity-Organizing Approach--assist health professional-community partnerships in planning and evaluating community organizing-based health promotion programs. These programs activate community stakeholders to alter their community's disease-causing, population-level determinants through grassroots policy advocacy, potentially reducing health disparities affecting communities of color.