4 Things You Can Do to Help Your Child Maintain a Healthy Weight
An estimated 25 percent of Australian children are overweight or obese. This puts these kids at increased risk for a number of chronic health concerns including cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, sleep apnoea, asthma and mental health conditions.
As a mum, there are multiple things you can do to help your child avoid this situation and maintain a healthy weight. You’re no doubt already aware that your child needs to eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise; the following tips dig deeper beyond those usual, all-too-obvious suggestions to explore some of the other things that can adversely affect body weight:
1. Ensure Your Child Does Not Ingest Secondhand Cigarette Smoke
There are many good reasons to protect your child from exposure to cigarette smoke. One of the most compelling reasons is that cigarette smoke ingestion might cause or contribute to childhood obesity. According to research published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal, there is a correlation between high body mass index (BMI) in children and exposure to smoke and other environmental pollutants.
2. Minimise Exposure to “Obesogens” – Both for You and Your Child
Babies, and even foetuses, are frequently exposed to a broad range of toxins. In some cases, when a pregnant mum-to-be ingests certain environmental contaminants, it could potentially result in the child having a tendency to later become overweight or obese. And in other cases, direct exposure to the contaminants is a probable factor in contributing to weight gain.
There’s a long list of pollutants to be aware of, and it’s no easy task to avoid them all. Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to make any amount of effort you can to protect your family from them. A few of the contaminants you’ll want to try to avoid are high fructose corn syrup, Bisphenol A (BPA), dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), organochlorines (OCs) and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB). These are not the only possible culprits; see here for a more complete list of potential obesogens.
3. Be Prudent When Giving Your Child Antibiotics
There are many different strains of beneficial gut bacteria that help people to digest their food, maintain a healthy weight and ensure normal levels of immunity. When a person ingests antibiotics, they not only kill the pathogenic bacteria that cause sickness; they also kill these beneficial bacteria, too. So it’s important to limit your family’s use of antibiotics to only medically urgent instances.
Antibiotics only work to rid the body of certain types of bacterial infections. They are ineffective when it comes to ridding the body of viral infections. Therefore you should avoid giving your child antibiotics to remedy flu or cold symptoms, which are typically caused by viruses. Avoidance of unnecessary antibiotics will help to preserve your child’s beneficial gut bacteria and maintain proper digestion.
4. Get Assistance From an Expert Dietitian
Nutrition is complex, and there are many factors that contribute to a child’s physique. If your child is struggling to achieve healthy body weight, it is possible that your family might benefit from having a dietitian’s help to analyse and improve the situation.
A dietitian has expertise in recommending meal plans, foods and dietary supplements that are sure to be beneficial – and the dietitian will have the opportunity to take your child’s specific health conditions and nutritional needs into consideration when making recommendations.
It is possible that, in some cases, dietitians’ services may be partially covered by the public Medicare system; in Australia, you’ll generally need to have your GP issue a referral in order to access Medicare funds for covering a dietitian’s services.
If you maintain cover with a private health fund, your extras cover policy might include partial or full cover for dietitian’s services. If you don’t have an extras cover policy, but you anticipate that you’ll be needing it for dietitian visits or other types of allied health services, you can visit the Ask James website to compare the offerings and choose the best policy from multiple private health insurance providers.
Of course, diet and exercise are critical in addition to all the things mentioned above; but beyond diet and exercise, if you take these 4 actions, you’re likely to make a difference in helping your child to maintain healthy body weight.
