Childhood Obesity Research Paper

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Effects of Childhood Obesity on Adult Disease and Death

Toby Bradford
KINE 4331
Tyler Garner
January 4, 2015

Obesity has numerous negative effects on the body throughout one’s life, especially when one has been obese for an extended period of time. The world’s life expectancy has been on a rise for many years now, but the increasing rate of obesity in the world is likely to change that. This paper is going to focus on how childhood obesity is supposed to affect a person’s rate of morbidity and mortality when they reach adulthood. Given what is known about the adverse effects of obesity, it isn’t difficult to assume that being obese as a child can greatly impact one’s health and risk for disease, both immediately as well as later …show more content…

They looked into the immediate consequences, intermediate consequences, and long term consequences. With the immediate consequences, they found that the child could get hepatitis, gallstones, greater intracranial pressure, and gallstones, all before even reaching adulthood. With the intermediate consequences Must and Strauss observe that, according to the Muscatine Study, when compared to non-obese kids, children whom are obese are 10 times more likely to attain hypertension during adulthood. They also find that anywhere from twenty five to fifty percent of obese children remain obese as adults. With the long-term consequences they found that when obese as a child, adult women were more likely to attain arthritis and hip fractures, adult men were more likely to have gout and colon cancer, and both male and females were at greater risk of developing atherosclerosis and heart …show more content…

It is also obvious that being obese as an adult greatly increases the likelihood of acquiring morbidities such as cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease as well as overall mortality. What has not been found in any of these studies is an increased risk of morbidity and mortality in a person who was obese as a child and no longer obese as an adult. Only the study from Must and Strauss (1999) discuss the devastating effects found in children due to obesity. But even then, the population in their study was on the very extreme end of childhood obesity to the extent that the child had to actually go to a pediatric specialty clinic due to his severe obesity. In order to truly find the effects of being obese as a child on your health later in life, given that the weight is lost before reaching adulthood, more research needs to be done and more data needs to be

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