Childhood Obesity Leads to Long Term Illness - Coursework Example

Childhood Obesity leads to long term illness Obesity in children has many severe health outcomes that can last a lifetime incorporating type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Other children often taunt children who are having a little additional weight. Sometimes adults, family associates and even educators can be just as cruel. Children that are taunted about their weight undergo stress tremendously. The stress and apprehension caused by a childs aversion towards their body often takes toll on them. They renounce trying to engage in bodily activity because they cannot continue or compete. As the occurrence of childhood plumpness increases, the health problems children experience can persist till they turn into adults. To stop the sequence, we need to realize both the health matters and the emotional suffering caused by childhood plumpness and take small steps to manipulate children to become more vigorous in terms of their livelihood (Peer Pressure Plays a Part in Childhood Obesity, n.d.). The study centers on the obesity in children and will focus on the issue about how obesity changes with the increase or decrease in other factors. To show this analysis, regression as a tool has been used in the study. Problem Statement: How the weight influences the health condition of the children? This is the main problem that has been addressed in this study. Over the past 30 years, the occurrence of plump children is identified as those having a body mass index (BMI) more than the 85th percentile for age and gender have tripled. Above 30 per cent of toddlers in the United States are plump or obese (BMI > 95th percentile). Childhood plumpness results from a malfunction of the body’s self-dictatorial system to adapt to environmental controls characteristic of the person’s genetic backdrop. Various aspects in the process of the multifaceted genetic-environment communications that cause plumpness will support long-term positive energy equilibrium. Consequences from longitudinal studies propose that a modest constant energy disparity, which is hard to detect by current techniques of measuring energy ingestion and expenditure, is probably the eventual cause of obesity (Chaput and Tremblay, 2006, p.1). Obese toddlers are exposed to weight stigma and may be susceptible to psychological consequences, such as dejection, and social consequences, such as remoteness. Consequences of bias, such as separation or social removal, could donate to the exacerbation of plumpness through psychosomatic vulnerabilities that augment the likelihood of over-consumption and inactive activity. It is clear that prejudice, unfairness and discrimination are element of everyday life for these plump children (Chaput and Tremblay, 2006, p.1). Table1. provides the prevalence of plumpness from the Health Survey for England by the 28 Strategic Health Authorities (SHA), from the maximum to the minimum level of prevalence, together with computations of the total population for each region (See Appendix.). The adult plumpness is the long term effect of childhood plumpness. There appears little doubt that there are plumper and obese toddlers and adults today than there were in the 1970s and the 1980s. Present data from the annual Health Survey for England 2003, issued by the Department of Health on December 14, 2004, propose that it is time for an equivalent re-think in this nation. While it is routinely demanded that there has been a ‘quick acceleration’ of plumpness in children since the 1990s, official survey data do not bear this out (Chaput and Tremblay, 2006, p. 2). The average BMIs for all children aged less than 16 years from 1995 to 2003 are shown in Figure 1. below. It can be seen that there has been a rise of nearly 0.5 in BMI over the nine year span for boys and 0.6 for girls. This rate of enhancement can hardly justify the demand of quick acceleration. Figure 1: Average BMI for boys and girls under 16 years. BM Year Source: Obesity and the Facts, Feb. 2005, p. 4. An epidemic of childhood plumpness and overweight intimidates long-term medicinal, psychosocial, and financial impacts beyond U.S. society’s recent capacity to react, according to researcher Rita Lavizzo-Mourey. Recent evidence implies a worst-case trend. Over a generation, rates of plumpness have nearly tripled among toddlers aged 6 to 11 years, and in 2004 17.1 per cent of toddlers and adolescents in the United States were plump. The researcher notes that toddlers in certain demographic subsets, including African American youngsters, are especially vulnerable to plumpness and its unfavorable health effects, adding to the burden of populace that are already unduly uninsured and experiencing dissimilarities in health care (Chronic Illness in Childhood, n.d.). Procedures: In our present study we will look upon only one type of research methods- quantitative approach. Quantitative research relies on subjective information because the participants’ input acts as the primary source of information to the researcher (Creswell, 2001).  In the present study quantitative data has been collected from secondary sources, mainly from the websites of The Information Centre (Creswell, 2001).  The current study has taken into account data on weight, general health, acute sickness and long standing illness of the children of England who are between 0 to 15 years of old for a period of 1995 to 2007. In total, there are 208 observations. General health, longstanding illness and acute sickness are regressed on weight to check whether increase in weight has any influence on these variables. In total, there are four variables. Weight is the explanatory variable and general health, longstanding illness and acute sickness are the dependent variables. MS-Excel is used to carry out the regression analysis for this study. Results and Analysis: In the first case, we are regressing general health on weight. Yt =α1+α2Xt+ut ------------------------------------(1) Where, Yt is the general health and Xt is the weight of the children of England between 0 to 15 years of age. ut is the error term. The null hypothesis is given as: H0: α2=0 i.e., Weight has no significant effect on general health Against the alternative hypothesis, H1: α2 0 i.e. Weight has significant effect on general health P-Value is defined as the lowest significant level at which a null hypothesis can be rejected. It is the observed significance level. By the help of P-value, we can predict that whether there is any influence of explanatory variable on the explained variable.   Here P-value of α2 is 2.081E-09 which is less than 0.05 at 95% confidence level i.e. 2.081E-09 Read More