What You Have to Realize About Childhood Obesity

This growing trend has been studied by researchers and professionals for over thirty years. Teenagers, pre-teens and even young children have been steadily gaining more and more weight and the consequences to their health are staggering. Countless studies and mountains of research have been conducted with regards to this problem over the last twenty years or so. The one thing that is for sure is that childhood obesity is a major risk factor for several terrible diseases that happen later in life. The most important thing parents need to realize is that there is quite a lot more to this particular story. Children who suffer from clinical obesity will be forced to deal with the affects of their conditions far before they grow into adulthood.

The whole human body is stressed in physical areas if you are overweight. If we look at the respiratory system, children that are obese can have obstructive sleep apnea that can be potentially dangerous. Normal breathing is also something that can be affected by being obese.

Asthma can be developed if a child or young adult is overweight. Other problems that face the normal breathing process are often called exercise intolerance. Overweight people often have trouble breathing, which you may have noticed. This is caused by the body having to work harder and breathe harder. This is just making it easier for you to have more stress on your cardiovascular system. Widespread research has proven that kids who suffer from obesity are far more likely to suffer from sleep apnea than kids who aren't obese. This particular condition is especially dangerous because it causes the child's airway to become blocked while he or she is sleeping. Obese and overweight children are more prone to snoring but that is slightly deceiving according to those doing the research. Sometimes kids snore because they have what is called OSA or obstructive sleep apnea. The adenotonsillectomy is one possible solution to the problem of sleep apnea in children and teens who are obese.

Researchers still don't know if there is a direct correlation between obesity and early onset puberty which is more common in girls than in boys. Of course, there is a fair amount of common sense involved in looking at what we know already. For example, we know that kids who are obese and overweight grow faster and enter puberty earlier. It is a situation, though, in which definite causation needs to be defined. While this is obviously not that serious a threat as the other obesity related problems, there are definitely serious implications that accompany abnormally young ages for the onset of puberty. Obese kids and young adults have often been (accurately) described as "the walking wounded." This is because obesity ravages both the body and the mind.

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