Child Health Teenage Obesity Often Carried Into Adulthood

Child Health

Teenage Obesity Often Carried Into Adulthood

It’s not uncommon to gain weight as we age. As adolescents we get taller and add weight to fill out the proportion, but there is a time when we stop sprouting up and weight should stabilize. However, a new study shows that teens who don’t maintain a healthy weight and become obese, have a high likelihood of becoming severely obese by the age of thirty.
Teenage obesity is a growing problem, an issue derived from poor eating habits, lack of physical education in the schools, and an increasing addiction to television, computers, and video games. Being obese during childhood and adolescence increases the risk for health problems associated with cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol, diabetes, and hypertension, But teens who already have weight challenges are in for an even tougher time as adults, as they are seven times more likely to become severely obese compared to their normal-weight peers. For females and some ethnic minorities, the likelihood is over 50 percent.
The study, out of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, monitored 8,834 participants, age 12-21, for thirteen years. For those whose weight was in normal range at the onset, only 5 percent aged into severely obese, while 51.3 percent of females and 37.1 percent of males who were obese as teenagers morphed into a severely obese adult.
While diet and exercise are the safest methods for teens to lose weight, gastric bypass surgery is becoming more popular with obese teens. While the benefits of gastric bypass surgery are many—increased life expectancy, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, reduction in cardiac disease—there is controversy when it comes to teenagers and this life-altering surgery. While the risk of death is low in adults, falling below 1 percent, there are other complications and resulting issues for teens considering this surgery, one of which is birth defects. The various surgical procedures used on the morbidly obese can reduce the absorption of critical vitamins and minerals, particularly folic acid. That reduction can lead to a higher risk of birthing babies with spine and brain birth defects.
But despite the life-extending benefits bariatric surgery may provide, experts like Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, argue that bariatric surgery does not deal with the cause of the obesity epidemic among teens. “A large and growing proportion of all children and adolescents are subject to obesity, and its complications,” Katz said. “Surgery can mitigate those complications, but can we really condone ushering more and more young people through the OR doors for a major surgical procedure to fix what policies and programs that foster healthful eating and regular activity could have prevented in the first place?” Katz says it should be a last resort and that “we should do all we can to minimize the need for this procedure by combating the root causes of obesity in our society.”
Thirty-four percent of adult Americans are carrying around enough extra pounds to be considered obese, and that additional weight can cause moderate to severe health problems, add heath care costs, and shorten lives.  It is crucial that we pay attention to our children’s health, eating habits and weight. As parents, it is incumbent upon us to set a good example and make sure that our children are healthy, to avoid future health problems and traumas.