Today in America, 12% of children under the ages of 18 are obese and unhealthy. Many children who are overweight are affected by insecurity, bullying and medical issues, they may even develop psychological issues. Doctors think that childhood obesity is linked to parents who are neglectful, who either feed them too much junk food or do not encourage physical activity. There are a lot of causes for childhood obesity, one of them being TV as it is often preferred by the young child than outdoor psychical activity. Another reason is that school lunches are often unhealthy and full of sugar, sodium, and fat, that could lead to type 2 diabetes and obesity. Other issues that obesity can cause are, cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. This is all caused by poor diet and little to no exercise, doctors blame the parents but what if it is out of the control of the parents and the school systems lunches are slowly fattening up our future.
I started this research process over a few weeks at the end of April and the beginning of May 2018. This research has a total of five sources that include, two web sources, and academic articles. My research gave me more of an understanding on childhood obesity and how we could prevent early stages of the disorder.
Annotated Bibliography
Best, John R., et al. “Shared Weight and Dietary Changes in Parentâ??Child Dyads Following Family-Based Obesity Treatment.” Health Psychology, vol. 35, no. 1, 2016, pp. 92–95., doi:10.1037/hea0000247.
In this peer reviewed academic article, the author’s main goal for this article was to see if parents who were active in losing weight would affect their children in losing weight as well. The authors wanted to see if the parents
Cooper, Ann. “Bad Food Is Making Our Kids Sick (and How to Take Charge).” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-cooper/a-lunch-lady-serves-up-he_b_857253.html.
This article is about the author and chef Ann Cooper, and her journey to put healthier, more fresh, “cooked from scratch” meals into schools all across the country. She recognized the need of locally grown food for the children. Ann founded the Food Family Farming Foundation in 2009 to help give schools the funding, tools, supplies, and teaching that allows them to provide a healthier meal for students across the country. A few of her projects is the “Let’s Move Salad Bars to School” and “The Lunch Box: Healthy Tools For Healthy Schools”, these projects work to getting healthier food into schools in America. Her “Lunch Box” project is a website that has recipes, educational videos, financial tools and so much more to help bring more knowledge in cooking for schools across America. Her other project “Let’s Move Salad Bars to School” is a way to fundraise and donate salad bars to school, giving the students a healthier option.
I thought that this author was credible because she is a very experienced chef and author, as she is published by the Huffington Post. She has graduated from Culinary Institute of America, has 40 years of experience being a chef including 17 years of being involved in school food systems. I think she was also credible because of her lack of negativity on America’s school lunch program, she just wants to make it better so that the children can grow up and be productive adults to make America a better place. This article was very useful as it shows that there are some action taking place into making school lunches healthier.
Rabin, Roni Caryn. “Obesity and School Lunches.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Feb. 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/health/research/08childhood.html.
This article is from the New York Times and is written by Roni Caryn Rabin. It talks about the increasing numbers of childhood obesity in America and how the school lunches are being improved. In this article, they did a study on 1,000 sixth graders and according to the article, the students who eat the school lunches are 29% more likely to be obese than the students who brought their own lunches from home. According to the article, a federal law has been pass back in December of 2010, that the Department of Agriculture had made schools put a limit of calories into each lunch and they are required to have more vegetables and fruits.
I liked this article because it was short and to the point, I believed it to be credible because it has been published on the New York Times website. The author, Roni Caryn Rabin, has been a staff writer for the New York Times for two and a half years, she has attended both, Oberlin College for English and creative writing, and Columbia University where she got her Masters of Science. This article was useful as it ended on a good note saying there has been a law passed to where our school lunches require a calorie count.
