Child Obesity Essay

Who’s To Blame for Obesity? Do you want to be surrounded with a society filled with obese children? Obesity has become a big problem in America. Parents are not being careful with the amount of junk food they’re allowing their kids to take in. According to Daniel Wientraub’s article â€Å"The Battle Against Fast Food Begins in the Home†, he claims that parents are in the position to fight the epidemic of overweight children, not the government or fast food companies. I agree with Daniel Wientraub because parents should be held accountable for the obesity of their children. Advertising has become Americas biggest tool for manipulating kids in the U.S as indicated in David Barboza’s â€Å"If you Pitch It, They Will Eat It†, New York Times article , professor Linn of Harvard says â€Å"The programs have become advertising for the food and the food has become advertising for the programs (Barboza,P.39,Par.33).† Children are getting attached to television and programming, wh ich is where the fast food commercials vastly appear. For example, kids begin to ask their parents for fast food just because there happens to be a toy in their â€Å"Happy Meal†. Parents don’t have the strength needed to continue managing on telling their children â€Å"No!† because they will cry, nag, and proceed to bug their parents to take them. Marketing strategies aim on manipulating kids, and the more being targeted, the more money they continue making. Parents need to start saying â€Å"No!† and begin acting like the boss, instead of it being the other way around. Exercising is a huge factor on staying healthy. A vastly amount of kids in America are not participating in physical education. In the article â€Å"The Battle Against Fast Food Begins in the Home† Daniel Weintraub indicates â€Å"We limit television and encourage our boys to get out the house, either to participate in organized sports or to ride their bikes, skateboards, or roller blades(Weintraub,P.43,Par.15).† This particularly indicates that parents need to push and motivate their children to exercise daily, to remain active. Staying fit is more important because it prevents obesity. The majority of children lack exercise and stuff themselves with fast food but it isn’t their fault because their too young to comprehend any better. Parents need to step it up and provide their kids with consistent physical education to prevent their children becoming obese. Adolescents need to start noticing what they are feeding their children. A great amount of food comes from the home kids are living in. in Daniel Wientraub’s  article â€Å"The Battle Against Fast Food Begins in the Home†, he states that, â€Å"We try to cook as many meals as possible on the theory that even the last healthy home cooked meal is probably better for our children than the healthiest fast food serving (Weintraub, P.43, Par.15).† I support this claim because when kids are given a meal at home, their parent can provide and control the ingredients they are feeding them, in contrast to when they are eating out. Therefore, kids can consume vegetables and healthy edibles that their parents are serving at home, without worrying about the bad factors that fast food is giving them. In other words, cooking at home is a veritable good way for parents preventing obesity. Others may suggest that fast food services are at fault for childhood obesity. However, I believe this is faulty reasoning because fast food places provide a great amount of high fattening food that makes kids gain weight. Support of my position can be found in the following â€Å"Fast foods marketing strategies, which make perfect sense from a business perspective, succeed only when they induce a substantial number of us to overeat (Brownie, P.33, Par.6).† This clearly substantiates my position by illustrating that purchasing fast food products may be cheap and less time consuming, but it is a bad decision for parents to make on their children. In conclusion, I am adamant that parents are responsible for what they feed their kids. As such, in my opinion it would be in our best interest for parents to stand up and help children at most they can. If parents follow this course of action, I am confident that child obesity will decrease not only in America, but all over the world.