Child Development and Public Health

Nutrition-Obesity Epidemic
I chose to look at nutrition from a different standpoint. I think it is appalling to me that our children are growing up obese and not being taught how to implement good and proper nutrition. I have struggled with weight my entire life. I grew up in an environment where we had home cooked meals often. Much of what we ate was grown on the farm, from vegies to the meat we ate, and we always sat down at the table together. However, the downside (I think) to being raised by people who had been through the depression and had nothing was we were told we should be grateful we had food and to eat everything on our plate. If we did get to go out to eat, we were reminded how much money was being spent on this meal and we were not to waste food-again eating everything on our plate.
Today we live in a society of fast everything and it is so much easier to go through the drive-through, or get a boxed meal out of the frozen food section than it is to prepare a healthy and nutritious meal. There is a part of me that understands this and an occasional drive-through meal is not bad. The problem begins when it is a daily occurrence. I have children in my class that eat fast food at least 3 nights a week. Many children come in with white powder on their face from the donuts they had on the way to school. I recently went clothes shopping for my niece and discovered that they now have a "plus size" section in the kids department!! REALLY!!
Although children are taught about nutrition in school, the schools do not support what they are teaching. In my town all of the school districts have made a "deal" with a soda company to put their soda machines in all of the schools (including elementary) and they give money to the schools.
I have collected some information from the internet that will hopefully help some of you in making & teaching better choices for children. I discovered this chart that shows how nutrition labels are skewed when it comes to child nutrition. This website had more detailed information about this chart so please visit it:
www.bcm.edu/cnrc/consumer/archives/percentDV.htm

How Food Label Reference Values (DV) Compare to the Nutritional Recommendations for Children
Nutrient	DV	Nutrient Recommendations by Age (DRI)*
		2 - 3 years	4 - 8 years	9 - 13 years	14 - 18 yr girls	14 - 18 yr boys
Protein (grams)	50	13	19	34	46	52
Iron (mg)	18	7	10	8	15	11
Calcium (mg)	1,000	500	800	1300	1300	1300
Vitamin A (IU)	5000	1000	1333	2000	2333	3000
Vitamin C (mg)	60	15	25	45	65	75
Fiber (g)	23	14 - 19	19 - 23	23- 28 (girls) 25- 31 (boys)	23	31-34
Sodium (mg)	2400	1000- 1500	1200- 1900	1500-2200	1500-2300	1500-2300
Cholesterol (mg)	300	<300 for over age 2	<300	<300	<300	<300
Total Fat (g)**	65	33 - 54 (30 -35% of calories)	39 - 62 (25 - 35% of calories)	62 - 85 (25 - 35% calories)	55 - 78 (25 - 35% calories)	61 - 95 (25 - 35% of calories)
Saturated Fat (g)**	20	12 - 16 (> age 2 ) (<10% calories)	16 to 18 (<10% calories)	girls: 18-22 boys: 20-24 (<10% calories)	22 (<10% calories)	24 - 27 (<10% calories)
Calories***	2000	1000 - 1400 (2-3 years)	1400-1600	girls: 1600-2000 boys: 1800-2200	2000	2200- 2400
Source: 1999 - 2002 Dietary Reference Intakes, Institutes of Medicine 2005 Dietary Guidelines ©Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine               Last modified: August 14, 2007

I found numerous websites out there that talk about resources and organizations that promote different areas of nutrition such as nutritional information, exercise, getting children involved in planning, buying and preparing meals for the family, health risks.
This web site discussed malnutrition, but also noted that obesity is becoming just as much a problem in some countries as malnutrition.
The number of obese people in many countries is fast overtaking the number who are underweight — even in the poorest rural regions (see Figure 2). In Mexico, for example, nearly 60 per cent of people are overweight, compared with less than ten per cent underweight.
for some reason I could not get this chart to copy to the blog.  It is definitely worth looking at though. 

Figure 2: Percentage of women (aged 20–49) in rural areas that are underweight and overweight in selected developing countries (credit: Barry M. Popkin, University of North Carolina Interdisciplinary Obesity Program)

www.scidev.net › ... › Features
We have to do monthly parent activities at my school and I am going to incorporate nutrition into one of them as well as printing the food label information to give to my parents. I hope everyone finds some information they can use from these sites.
fnic.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?...4...
www.nutrition.gov/

fnic.nal.usda.gov/nal.../index.php?info...4...