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Child obesity is increasing dramatically around the world, maintains Mary Eberstadt in the following viewpoint. She argues that while adult obesity can be seen simply as a result of free choice, children's obesity cannot. In her opinion, rising childhood obesity is due to a lack of parental care, particularly from mothers who often work outside the home and no longer monitor their children's eating habits as closely as they once did. Obese children suffer from a large number of physical and mental health problems, Eberstadt contends. Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center devoted to advanced study of politics, economics, and international affairs.
As you read, consider the following questions:
What do Canadian statistics show about the number of overweight children in Canada, as cited by Eberstadt?
What extra medical problems do overweight children suffer from, according to the author?
As explained by Eberstadt, why is heredity not a sufficient explanation for the increase in child obesity?
Just three months ago [in late 2002] a major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] confirmed what any American with eyes even half-open could already have reported—that not only our adults, but also our children, are fat and getting fatter all the time. As the Department of Health and Human Services put it in a summary of this latest study's evidence, "Among children and teens ages 6 to 19, 15 percent (almost 9 million) are overweight according to the 1999-2000 data, or triple what the proportion was in 1980."
The widespread media attention given to this bad-news story would appear to be justified, for the JAMA study followed at least two other blue-chip examinations during the past year or so of the underage fat explosion. One of these, a report on the...
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