Preventing overweight and obesity in childhood

Introduction: Nowadays a serious problem for public health is childhood obesity. The beginning of the problem is when excessive weight gain happens in children before school. When the obesity begins, it is difficult to reverse, and it can affect the future life and is related to risk of CVD, some type of cancers and type 2 diabetes mellitus. So prevention of obesity is necessary. The progression of obesity is multi-factorial and therefore, its prevention is a hard challenge. The best determinants of obesity are changing life style, such as diet and physical activity. Recently, some factors have been known as key influencers of obesity in childhood. Finding the risk factors is important to find solutions for preventing obesity in early childhood. For preventing obesity, multi-component interventions might be effective. Among interventions that are common, in UK, TrimToms is used, that is a mixture of art and physical activity for children that might be effective in preventing obesity. Methods: For this review, we studied the articles from 2000 to 2019 in PubMed and Scopus, by searching obesity AND children AND prevention . Results: Studies have shown that Multi-component interventions that target feeding and parenting styles in infants, and diet and physical activity in older preschool children might be successful in reducing obesity risk. Also, it has been shown that children that played TrimToms had lower BMI than other children. Conclusion: Determining and assessment of intervention for preventing obesity is a challenge for clinicians and researchers. Also, parents face the barriers of the interventions. This review studies the obesity risk factors in early life and shows some preventive interventions and talks about the barriers and facilitators to their success .

Keywords:

Obesity , Children , Prevention