Is the New Zealand society helping to reduce the amount of obese children?

“When I was 5 years old,

my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.

When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I wrote down "happy". They told me I didn’t understand the assignment.
I told them they didn’t understand life."
— John Lennon

There are many sports at primary school that children are involved in like push play, five + a day and compulsory sport activities. But what is there that children under five to participate in.

There are outdoor environments where children are able to run around have sports equipment and be free but is this really reducing the obesity rate and helping stop it in children.

What is New Zealand doing to encourage healthy eating?

Sanitarium is in the process of proposing a three traffic light food labelling system. It identifies “negative” nutrients. At the same time, it takes into account “positive” nutrients through a colour scheme based on the nutrient found in food. This is helping people to distinguish between healthy foods, non healthy food and food that looks healthy but is full of negative nutrients.

Push play was introduced to New Zealand to inspire New Zealanders to become more active. Push play’s primary focus was on women between the age of 25 – 50. The focus was mainly on women as they were viewed as less physical then males. In 2005 it was reviewed and changed to initiate all children into the push play programme that was organised for 30 – 60 minutes of physical activity a day. There are many resources that have been created for children under 5 to participating in physical movement experiences (SPARK: ihi Aoteroa sport and recreation New Zealand, 2011).

Tartamella, Herscher and Woolston (2004) say that  with push play programme of 30 – 60 minutes a day of healthy eating that children are getting enough physical activity to reduce obesity rate and to get more children healthy. However, O’Brian and Taylor (2004) say that this is not going to reduce obesity rates unless children have healthy eating as well and that there needs to be more physical activity offered to children from 0 – 12.

So who is right? There is research that shows healthy eating and physical activity will help reduce the number of obese people and help people already obese loss weight but there is also research that shows healthy eating is the most important thing however I found a minimal amount of research that shows eating healthy alone will help with obesity.

I found this video on you tube that shows why there are many obese people around especially in pacific islanders. I found it very interesting to watch and see why obesity is so high in communities that grow and have built their life on eating fruit.

There are many things that the New Zealand community can do or are doing to lower the obesity rate however there are also many things that they are doing that are keeping the obesity rate high, like losing our fruit and vegetables to overseas and advertising and lowering cost of processed foods.

References:

O’Brian, B. & Taylor, Dr. R. (2004). The f word: A New Zealand Guide to preventing childhood obesity. Auckland, New Zealand: David Bateman Ltd.

SPARK: ihi Aotearoa sport and recreation New Zealand. (2011). Retrieved from  http://www.sparc.org.nz/en-nz/young-people/Ages-0-5-Years/.   

Tartamella, L., Herscher, E., & Woolston, C. (2004). Generation extra large: Rescuing our children from the epidemic of obesity. New York, NY: Basic Books.