A review of effective interventions for reducing and controlling obesity in primary school children

Abstract

Objectives: The prevalence of obesity has been doubled among children over the past 10 years, which will result in an obese population and its complications in near future. This situation can impose great costs on the health system and community for treating those obese people. The purpose of this review is to examine the effective strategies for reducing and controlling obesity in primary school students. Methods: This review was conducted in August and September 2017. Our goal was to review the related articles in the authorized databases, including Scientific Information Center (SIC), Scholar Google, Scopus, and PubMed, from 2000 onward, by two researchers, considering language constraint (only English articles with full text were accepted). Out of 104,658 articles, 15 articles were excluded due to the lack of full text, and finally 25 articles were selected. Results: The results of the existing studies showed that through involving parents, schools officials and continuous supporting measures like prohibition of long-term food advertising in television programs, all three educational, nutritional and physical activity interventions can help in controlling and reducing obesity. Conclusions: To succeed in reducing and controlling obesity among students, especially primary school ones, the approaches and interventions should be implemented in three levels: home, school, and community.

Child obesity moderates the association between poverty and academic achievement

“…Ideally, the ultimate goal of home‐based interventions (Pamungkas & Chamroonsawasdi, 2019) and population‐wide policies (Keya et al, 2019) should be lifestyle modification, which is likely to have long‐term positive effects upon child development and overall public health (Hsiang et al, 2020; Salam et al, 2020). Taken together, because parental behaviors, family patterns, household conditions, and community factors shape child developmental and body weight trajectories, intervention programs, and public policies should include nutritional and physical activity education for parents (Chai et al, 2019; Dev et al, 2013; C. Li et al, 2020), make available healthy food choices at reasonable prices in local stores (Dolati et al, 2020), as well as provide financial investment into the physical and social infrastructures of the disadvantaged communities (e.g., creating neighborhood facilities for recreation; Puga et al, 2020).…”