It seems that Americans will continue to debate and fight over health care reform in our country no matter what the outcome will be on Capitol Hill. In reality, we need to take the health care fight to our own home and not to congress. What I mean by saying this is we need to start at home making healthy choices for ourselves and our children.
There is an epidemic that is not only taking over our country but the entire world population. It is the disease called obesity. The amount of obese people in the world is on the rise and here in America over one-third of adults are categorized as being obese.
Being obese brings many severe health concerns. Some major health issues obesity brings include:
- Type II Diabetes
- Heart Disease
- High Blood Pressure
- Sleep Apnea
- Cancer
- Coronary Artery Disease
The list goes on and on but these are just to name a few….
Can you believe that for the first time in history the number of obese people in the world now outweighs the number of malnourished? Today more children are so overweight, it is causing the medical field concern over health issues developing in these young children.. And in the United States alone, obesity is the number two factor of the leading cause of death taking more lives than Cancer, Accidents, and AIDS combined.
There are several factors that cause obesity and add to these statistics. People are less active now more than ever living in this new electronic age. Think about everyday life and how we use our cell phones to talk and text, lap tops, home PC, and of course video games. We are basically encouraging today’s youth in our society to be inactive.
All this leading to the point of why are we treat our pets better than we treat our own children. It is fair to say that we love our children more than our pets yet day in and day out we treat them much better then our children.
Think about this, we exercise our dog two times a day by walking them between a half hour to and hour once in the morning and once in the evening. That is an hour to two hours of exercise per day seven day a week and we can’t even get our children off the couch to just go outside and play for 30 minutes a day for three days a week! I am not suggesting you to put your children on a leash and drag them around the block but we must encourage them to get involved in some sort of fun activity to get them moving and burn some calories. We spend more time playing fetch with our dogs but are too lazy to play catch with our kids. Or how about this, we will take our dogs jogging with us but we are too busy to sign our kids up to play sports because it cuts into an adult’s busy schedule!
Now let’s talk about nutrition and what is being put in our children’s bodies compared to your pets. If I asked you why you don’t feed your pet french fries, ice cream, pizza, potato chips and wash it down with a bottle of soda you would look at me as if I had three heads! And what would response to me would be? “ I would never feed my pet that because he would get fat, sick, and it would not be healthy for them”
Hello………did you just hear what you said???? Yet you have no problem feeding these items to your child. Just look at a few list of things we put in our children’s bodies that you would never feed your pet. Nachos and cheese, cup cakes, Twinkies, chocolate, gummy bears, cookies, crackers, and stick margarine! And has anyone ever microwave your cat’s food? But let’s throw a hot pocket in for 60 seconds and serve. We are well versed in exactly what the proper healthy foods to feed our pets but do not take the time to become more knowledgeable on what is healthy or not healthy to feed our children. And do you Super-Size the portions you give your pets when you feed them? No right? Yet we are quick to pull up to the nearest fast food restaurant and when asked if we would like to super-size the meal today we jump all over it. Are you kidding me?
Listen, we need to take the time to actively put an effort in the health of our children they way we do our own pets. Can you imagine if our children ate the proper foods with proper potion sizes and exercised an hour a day seven days a week? Then maybe, just maybe the issues of health care reform would not be having such hot debates among politicians like it is at our nation’s capitol because less people would need the medical care that so many Americans are looking for.
