A new study suggests that, when children go through community or school programs of obesity intervention, their parents also lose weight and their body mass indexes decrease, due to the knowledge regarding the disease that their children bring to the household.
The battle against the obesity epidemic that has been taking the world by storm in the past few years has made researchers of the difference sciences (from medicine to psychology) to step up to the plate to see the causes and possible solutions of this disease; now, it seems that children's new knowledge could make their parents' health improve.
According to Science Daily, the findings have been published in a new study by United States Tufton University along with Shape Up Somerville: Eat Smart Play Hard entitled "Shape Up Somerville: Change in Parent Body Mass Indexes During a Child-Targeted, Community-Based Environmental Change Intervention" that appeared on the American Journal of Public Health.
In it, there was evidence of a correlation between children's participation in elementary school community intervention against obesity and their parents' decrease in BMI.
"We've provided new evidence that community wide school-based obesity prevention efforts may go beyond the target audience of young children and influence the weight status of their parent, who helps decide what they eat and how active they are at home," explained Christina Economos, one of the authors of the study, according to News Wise. "From a public health perspective, this is a pretty powerful observation."
The program, which has gathered a lot of supporters in the Somerville community, targeted the city's public elementary schools to talk to the children about obesity, its dangers and how important it was to eat healthily - and it also took to engaging the children's parents in the activities, which ultimately caused them to lose weight themselves as they became more aware of the importance of the issue.
