For almost a decade now, childhood obesity is a growing concern for parents as well as healthcare professionals. Being overweight brings serious health concerns for children including diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and orthopedic problems, such as increased stress on joints. Self-esteem also often decreases when children are overweight.

Why are more children overweight? Basically, genetic factors play a role in a child’s risk of being overweight, but obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years, while genes have not changed. That means that the recent widespread obesity problem is primarily caused by environmental factors.

In other words, genes are not the problem for the vast majority of people. Instead, two-thirds of obesity would vanish, he says, if society could revert back to the way it did certain things 40 years ago. Environmental factors that have changed since then include: what are we eating, how active we are and the family structure we have. Parents can think back to their childhood to what they ate and what they did for activities. In many cases, it is vastly different than what many families eat and do today.

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