Obesity sweeps the nation: Children and Teenagers at risk - Essay Example

Body esteem, or satisfaction with appearance, is the domain of self-worth most affected by obesity. Children with psychiatric illness are at greater risk for obesity than those in the general population, due to the escalating use of psychotropic medications. Though lifestyle modification is considered most effective in maintenance of weight loss, many parents, practitioners, children and adolescents are resorting to pharmacotherapy for achieving weight loss; long term safety of which has not been evaluated in children.

Obesity can have devastating psychosocial consequences. However, program managers should keep in mind that the mechanisms to impaired psychological health are different from those to physical illness. Thus, clinical monitoring and management of medication induced obesity remains and important public health concern. The prevalence of obesity in the industrialized world is increasing despite numerous public health campaigns to reduce it, including the best efforts of many governmental agencies as well as medical, nutritional, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries.

In the United States the high prevalence of obesity and overweight in six to seventeen years aged youths and pre-school children is of greater concern. Although the obesity epidemic is likely the result of changes in environmental conditions, “for the tide of this epidemic to be stemmed, scientists and public health workers will need to uncover the metabolic and environmental triggers leading to the development of obesity.” (Salbe et al, 69). For the last 100 years the scientific approach has not been able to accommodate a sophisticated understanding of the different ways people choose and are forced to live, and for this reason the world outside of obesity science does not always respond in the way medical science would wish.

Overweight and obesity are an accepted cause of numerous metabolic disorders. The obvious strategies for prevention and therapy of increased fat