Ammar Al-Hadhrami

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Article summary

Fighting Childhood Obesity: It's A Family Affair 

There are a lot of topics that parents don’t know how to discuss with their children and one of these topics is obesity. Many children suffer from overweight and parents don’t want to discuss this problem with them because they don’t want them to feel badly or lose their self-confidence. On 28 November 2011, Sarah Varent wrote Fighting Childhood Obesity: It's A Family Affair article in the NPR which talks about Packard Pediatric Weight Control program. This program offers the chance for both the child and his family to participate in a six month behavior changing boot camp. This boot camp as the author says helps the child and the family to follow a healthy eating and exercising habit. Moreover, the program depends on a traffic light system, there are red light foods, yellow foods, and green foods, children usually set goals to decrease their reds, which is junk food, red foods are not banned, but keeping track of how many reds they eat and bringing it down is the idea. Also, the author talked about Gabriel Rodrigues, who is one of the overweight children who participated on the program; he succeeded in decreasing his reds from 90 to 30 a month. In addition, the program changed his behavior for better, he started to follow a healthy exercising habit. Gabriel said that being with other children helped him to continue in the program and finish it, and for sure, being with his family in the program helped him too. Finally, the program has approved its success, because since 1999 about 80% of the children achieved their goals and became healthier.                                                                                                                                                    http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/11/28/142672879/fighting-childhood-obesity-its-a-family-affair