Overweight and obesity is a severe, persistent medical situation, which is linked with a broad variety of weakening and life frightening conditions. In the last one or two decades or so, rates of obesity in children have grown significantly in lots of countries around the world.

A startling survey reveals that between 5-25 percent of children and teenagers in the United States are overweight while other data point out that obesity among children is on the roll. What are the factors leading to this very common menace, can not be said clearly, but doctors and other health care professionals are the best people to find out whether a child or adolescent is overweight or not. They can also assist in ruling-out rare medical conditions as the cause of unhealthy weight.

What causes childhood obesity is the question doing the rounds in many civilized worlds today. Overweight is usually caused by lack of bodily activity, unhealthful eating patterns, or an amalgamation of the two. Moreover, genetics and lifestyle are both playing significant parts in shaping a child weight. On the other hand, obesity is associated to technological, social, economic and environmental changes today that have lessened physical activity and augmented food access and passive energy consumption.

At the moment, increases in sitting activities like TV, video games, use of the motor car for transport, and an increase in the consumption of high fat and high energy foods are forming the central causes of the current epidemic. This life-threatening menace could be best realized in some of the fast emerging and developed countries like the USA, Britain and Australia.

Childhood obesity has numerous causes centering around an inequity between energy in and energy out and most likely results from an interaction of nutritional, psychological, familial, and physiological factors. The danger of turning out to be obese is greatest among children who have two obese parents due to influential genetic factors or to parental modeling of both eating and exercise behaviors, indirectly affecting the child energy balance.

Now the average child around the world fritters away quite a few hours each day watching television and obesity is greater among children and adolescents who frequently watch television because of concurrent consumption of high-calorie snacks. Now fewer and fewer child love to take daily physical education and the number has lessened dramatically of the children who have taken extracurricular physical activity programs at their schools.

During the sedentary activity of sitting idle, only few calories are expended and not surprisingly, obesity rates are higher among children and teenagers who frequently watch television. In addition, excess nibbling is a likely cause of obesity in children. Moreover, these apart, over-consumption of fast food are another credible cause of child/teen obesity.

Obesity may well be encouraged by a faint body image, owing to peer pressure, parental influence - together with attitude of parents to weight loss and dieting. There in no denying about the fact that genes also affect a huge number of weight-related chemical processes in the body and metabolic rate, blood glucose metabolism, fat-storage, hormones to name but a few, are all influenced by our genetic inheritance.