Robinsons Fruit Juice

Obesity is becoming a major health crisis of the next generation. What parents can do to help children master their own weight:

Walk Do not Run

It's simple, cheap, and studies show that walking can be the best exercise to reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes

Pumping Iron preventive
By Shannon Brownlee

At 16, Lloyd Lamb already knows one thing or two about cruelty and loneliness. The Marion, Indiana, 10 classifier is bright and outgoing. He plays golf and fights. It is also 5 feet 8 inches, weighs 200 lbs. and sometimes suffers the taunts of his classmates. Lamb says he works hard to ignore, but there are times, he admits, when he was "depressed and lonely."

There must be many children only in America these days, judging by the surge in childhood obesity. According to the latest federal figures, the percentage of youth aged 6 to 11 years who are obese has tripled since the 1960s to 13%. Like many of 1 in 7 children is obese, and doctors are dangerously obese children as young as two years.

"We never had a population like this before," says Naomi Neufeld, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of Kid Fitness, a nonprofit program of weight loss in Los Angeles. "Children who are overweight are 20% to 30% more today than they were even 10 years ago.
We can not even imagine the medical costs that we see in the future. It feels like Armageddon. "

It is hardly an exaggeration. Last month, the Surgeon General has issued an urgent appeal to the nation to fight against his weight problem more and more a decision that was caused in part by the rate of the epidemic of childhood obesity.

Overweight children are more than twice as likely to suffer from hypertension or heart disease than normal weight children. More worrying still is the number of children with type 2 or noninsulin-dependent diabetes. Once known as adult diabetes before so many children get started, type 2 diabetes puts children at risk for very adult diseases, including blindness, nerve damage, kidney failure and cardiovascular disease.

What can parents protect their children against the dangers of the pound too? Many, especially if they start early, before their children into the habit of eating high fat, high sugar foods and the habit of regular exercise. Children are more vulnerable to ballooning weight in infancy and again in adolescence.

Children normally lose fat from ages one to six or seven years. When they start putting on excess weight as toddlers, they are at increased risk of obesity in adulthood for reasons that are not well understood.

Genes certainly contribute, but there is much parents can do to influence how their children eat and reduce the chances that they end up obese. Young children are very much in line with the number of calories they need to develop and maintain a normal weight, they know when they are hungry and when they are full. But most kids quit listening to these internal signals when they reach school age. The reason? Parents, says Leann Birch, a psychologist at Penn State University. "There are things parents do with good intentions which prove to be cons," she said. A familiar example: insisting that children clean their plate, a rule that can teach children to eat when n have not hungry.

Parents can influence what their children like to eat. Children are born with a sweet tooth and a salty one, but they must learn to appreciate other tastes. They often need to repeat the introductions to healthy fare such as beans and other vegetables. dessert using corrupt children eat nutritious foods can turn against, "said Birch.

"If children are given food as a reward, they learn to better than food," she said, and they learn to eat vegetables to the dog.

A better technique is to put several items on p.