YoNaturals Helps in the Fight Against Childhood Obesity

It’s difficult for the average person to know and understand what to do about the problem of childhood obesity. The problem has been ongoing since at least the middle of the 20^th century and is not likely to change unless parents and other caregivers step in and do something about the situation. Of course, the key is knowing what to do and how to go about doing it. For many outside of the nutritional field there can be some misunderstanding and lack of comprehension concerning the proper ways to reduce or eliminate the problem of childhood obesity.

One of the problems that we must overcome as a society before we can begin to reduce the instances of childhood obesity is the notion that a fat baby is a healthy baby. This line of thinking is where the problem of obesity begins—parents overfeed their babies either because they really think they are hungry or because they listen to well-meaning parents and grandparents who tell them their infant needs to put on some weight. As the baby grows, the parents continue to overfeed the child still thinking the child needs to be chunky or overweight to be healthy and happy. Before the age of cable television, computers and computer games this would not have been a real problem because the child would begin walking and go outside to run off all that excess energy.

Because children are less active today than they were during the early to mid 20^th century, there is a decreased need for food in our children. Providing the same amount of food to an active child as to a sedentary child is going to cause the child to become overweight and even obese. It is absolutely essential to make sure a child receives meals and snacks in accordance to his or her level of activity. A child that is only moderately active does not burn off as many calories as a child who is very active and thus needs less food.

Although meals have some bearing on childhood obesity, the real problem lies with the snacks the children eat. Parents are prone to feed their children cookies, cakes, candy and ice cream beginning at a very early age. In fact, some parents allow their children high calorie soft drinks before they even have teeth—no child should ever have soft drinks unless instructed by the doctor for nausea or an upset tummy. School Healthy Vending and Healthy Student Vending are two organizations that YoNaturals supports as providers of healthy vending machine snacks in the schools the children attend. Though not the only solution to childhood obesity, providing healthy vending machine snacks is a step in the right direction toward reducing childhood obesity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under YoNaturals Organic Vending. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.