Watching Your Child's Diet

Your child's health is very important to them and allowing it to suffer because of bad diet choices is foolish, especially when you consider the potential consequences.

Allowing a child to become overweight or even obese comes with a very risky set of baggage in later life that you may not be too happy about once you realize what it consists of!

Many Good Reasons

There are many really good reasons for maintaining a healthy weight, but probably the most important of all of them is all about protecting that most vital of their organs, the heart!

When a person is overweight their body stores a lot of excess fat and most people don’t really give it too much thought after the fact that it can look unsightly and it means they can’t get into smaller sized clothes.

But when you think that those fat cells are living cells that the body has to tend to by supplying them with blood, then you can see that the more fat a person has, the harder the heart has to work to pump the blood around their body.

This in itself is not so problematic when in childhood as the heart is strong and capable of managing the extra flow. But problems arise as they grow older in relation to being overweight.

They may have accumulated greater levels of bad LDL cholesterol flowing through that blood along with high levels of triglycerides. These can cause more problems for the heart especially as a person approaches middle age.

The increased flow that it has to cope with is impaired by the presence of these fats in the bloodstream and it is these that cause the arteries to start to clog up. If the blockage happens near to the heart itself, the risk of cardiovascular disease increases greatly and if the blockage moves into the heart itself, a coronary (heart attack) may result.

Problems Associated with Being Overweight

There are many health problems associated with being overweight that have their roots in childhood . This is especially the case when a bad diet is the cause, although it is possible to turn the problem around (see: www.ccwsd.org/can-nutrisystem-help/) with careful diet management.

When you're young, eating foods high in refined carbohydrates and drinking drinks such as soda containing high levels of sugar (sucrose and fructose) doesn't seem to have much of an affect aside from the weight gain. However, what you can't see is the damage being done on the inside.

The extreme rush of sugars in the bloodstream caused by excess sugar intake causes the body to counter with an equally extreme rush of insulin. The insulin carries the excess sugars out of the bloodstream to be processed by the body into fat and stored in those much maligned fat cells.

The favored resting place of that excess fat is around the abdomen, often referred to as “belly fat” or more correctly, visceral fat. This excess store of visceral fat and the insulin resistance that comes with the body having to constantly deal with too much glucose can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes as well as bring on a whole host of related health conditions in later life.

That's why it is best avoided by being careful about what your children eat and drink! If they are overweight, then consider getting them to lose weight as a matter of urgency.

It really pays to not be overweight and to be very aware of how your child's body weight can affect their health in many ways, now and later on. Keeping fit and at their correct weight is more important than many realize.


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