Britain: Parents are blind to their children’s obesity, say some researchers from the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth
Britain: Parents are blind to their children’s obesity, say some researchers from the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth. Obesity rates have gone up in recent times, and nearly half of Britons come under the overweight category. Apart from alarming obesity rates, perhaps what is even more disturbing is the parents’ apathy to obesity amongst their children, which is akin to sitting on a ticking time bomb.
During a latest study conducted among parents of 277 overweight children, only 25% of them recognized that their children were above normal weight limits. Possibly the inadequate knowledge of the harmful effects of obesity can be attributed to the indifference on the part of the parents.Preschool children also showed obese tendencies, the rate having gone up by 70% in the generation. And the parents of such pre schoolers, in 33% of the cases felt that it was normal weight, when there were clear tendencies of obesity.
Parents were also ignorant about their own weight problems, with nearly 45% of them acknowledging that the over weight was just about right for them. The researchers, led by Alison Jeffery, thus drew a conclusion that parents were not adept in noticing weight problems in themselves and their children. "The reasons for poor awareness might include denial, reluctance to admit a weight problem, or desensitization to excess weight because being overweight has become normal," they said. "Obesity is now a problem across all social groups. Our data confirm recent findings indicating that the long-standing inverse relationship between social class and obesity has been lost, at least in the UK."
