Analysis of Articles about Childhood Obesity - Essay Example

There needs to be more research to find the technique that works. “We believe that substantial funding to evaluate these programs could greatly accelerate progress, but will require creativity from a federal agency or foundation to break the usual mode of investigator-initiated research” (Schwartz and Brownwell, 2007). Article 2: Summary Much research has been done to explore the role of parenting in the development as well as prevention of obesity in children.

“Ana Lindsay, Katarina Sussner, Juhee Kim, and Steven Gortmaker argue that interventions aimed at preventing childhood overweight and obesity should involve parents as important forces for change in their children's behaviors” (Lindsay et al., 2006). Parents assume an important role in changing children’s consumption behaviors leading to obesity and overweight for the better. In this research, the authors reviewed the interventions obesity-prevention made at school with the components focused on the parents.

Even though a lot of research has been already done regarding the way parents develop the consumption and other habits of their children, not much data is available on such programs’ effectiveness. The authors emphasize the need to have more cost-effective studies and programs directed at the improvement of the parents’ abilities to develop good eating habits in their children. The authors concluded that parents play a very important role in the community-wide and multifaceted programs and policies that can be used to control and prevent childhood obesity.

Programs become successful when parents get involved in and directly work from the child development’s beginning to foster good practices inside the home as well as outside it. Article 3: Summary Competitive foods that mainly include junk food are sold by most of the high schools and middle schools in the USA to children today. Although much is known about the link between fizzy drink consumption and obesity among children, it is not widely known whether there is a link between the competitive food sold in schools and overweight or obesity in children.

The authors used the data retrieved from the “Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class” (Hook and Altman, 2012, p. 23) to examine this. Using the approach of a natural experiment as well as the fixed effects models, the authors found a lack of association between the weight gained by children from fifth to eighth grades and the exposure to or the introduction of sales of competitive food in middle school. In addition to that, the link between the increase in weight and competitive foods did not change much by such factors as race, gender, or the socioeconomic status of the family, and also remained insignificant and weak across other specifications of the model.

A major reason for these findings can be that the dietary patterns and food preferences of children are formed before they reach adolescence.