Families can incorporate healthy eating habits and take up exercises in order to encourage their children to eat healthy, irrespective of whether they are overweight or not. NICE (National Institute for Health Care Excellence) said that families form the core of the efforts that have been stared to eradicate obesity crisis in the UK. Obese children are likely to imitate the eating habits as practiced by their siblings and parents, this also gives the family members a way to provide support to children who are overweight.
In their new guidelines as issued by the Institute, parents can do this by developing their skills in problem solving so that they can teach their kids to eat healthy. This effort should be promoted by local services through the emphasis on incorporating proper eating habits. Studies show that at least three out of every ten kids within the age groups of two to fifteen are obese and at the risk of developing serious health complications that children of their age are not supposed to have. Children at the age of seven have been diagnosed with diseases associated with being overweight such type II diabetes, sleep apnea etc.
NICE has stated that the only way to handle this crisis is for health care professionals and providers to plan out and offer support programs to help parents or families who have overweight children. They can do this by emphasizing on how important it is for the family to eat well, so that their kids can learn to do the same through observing their environment. Professor Mike Kelly, the director of NICE who also handles the operations of their Public Health Centre, says the programs will provide the necessary support to show parents how to make changes in their homes and lifestyles that can help their children to lose weight.
He asserts that these changes are easy ones and is something that we should be practicing anyway and include good eating habits, planning family activities, reducing the amount of time spent watching TV or on the computer.
Kelly had also mentioned that children who are obese will also develop other problems like poor self esteem, are likely to get bullied significantly affecting the quality of their lives. The local authorities and commissioners have to ensure that these services can be made easily available to those people who will need them the most.