Tackling Childhood Obesity Research Proposal Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Tackling Childhood Obesity - Research Proposal Example When the behaviour is culminated in the community and family levels, the children also get to enter into these lifestyle cycles, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes due to lack of knowledge. It has been indicated in studies that dietary changes and schedules of daily activities lacking promotion of physical activities and lack of playtime activities are the reasons in cases of children (Edmunds et al., 2001). For example, in diets, fast foods have been included to a great extent. These contain items with high-fat and high-sugar contents. These mainly come from convenience items for family reasons. Work-roles in the families have led to a decrease in family meals. Outside the home environment, the patterns of dietary changes are also affecting food habits of the young. All studies have indicated the positive roles played by physical activity. Lack of physical activity has been implicated in children's weight gain in excess of what is ideal. Thus, there is a situation where the child ren are overweight or obese, and compounded to that there is a diminution of the physical activity in daily lives of the adolescents and the children (Reilly, 2006). Studies again indicated marked decline in schedules of physical activity in the middle school and high school schedules in children. This is more so in case of girls. This may be due to cutting down of physical education in school curricula. Additionally, there is increased use of television and computers, which decrease children's level of activities to a great extent leading to insufficient physical exercise (Brunt et al., 2008). The extent of obesity is assessed by classification in adults. However, it is difficult to assess the same in case of children by such classifications. For studies and research, given the problems in children, the prevalence is an important parameter to study. In research studies, classically this is measured in percentiles. Although there are legitimate criticisms, research literature has conventionally used body mass index. Consequently, there is a prescribed body mass index (BMI) for all ages, and 85th to 95th percentile of the standard BMI has been used as the landmark. This means children within this range will be considered at risk for being overweight. On the other hand, children who are beyond 95th percentile would be regarded overweight. It is evident that studies that involve at risk children as target population for intervention, would attempt to identify them, and in that context, these benchmarks could serve as effective identifiers. Once identified, these affected child ren may be intervened through designed public health measures with the objective and outcomes being prevention of future or existing obesity and reduction of complications and implications of obesity in them (Gibson et al., 2006). The global nature of this problem has already been mentioned, but the important parameter that this study attempts to address is launching the public health intervention at young age when the exposure to life style related risk