Contents:
- Medical Video: Pediatric Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease | UCLAMDCHAT Webinars
- Obesity in children is caused by fatty liver
- How to prevent it?
- 1. Introducing a healthy lifestyle as early as possible
- 2. Changing people's perceptions that obese children are not always healthy
Medical Video: Pediatric Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease | UCLAMDCHAT Webinars
Many people think that a plump, fat kid is healthy and adorable. In fact, fat does not always mean healthy. In January 2017, the Ministry of Health through the release of its media reported that cases of obesity in Indonesian children had tripled. Do not underestimate the risk of obesity in children. Obese children have the potential to develop various types of chronic diseases after they are adults, call it diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Obesity also increases the risk of liver disease in our nation's children in the future.
Obesity in children is caused by fatty liver
Excess fat deposits will be stored in various parts of the body. For example under the skin, in the cavity around the abdomen, waist and hips, to the chest. In addition, excess fat can also be stored in the liver (liver). This then causes a condition called fatty liver (fatty liver).
Fatty liver used to be more common in obese people in old age, but now the trend seems to change. A study says that at least 5-17% of the world's population suffer from children fatty liver at that age even as young as a dozen years.
If fatty liver continues to be allowed to continue, the condition can increase a child's risk of two chronic liver diseases that can be fatal, namely liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Cirrhosis is a chronic inflammatory infection that causes the liver to form many scarring. As a result, the size of the liver will become shrunken and accompanied by a decrease in various functions too early.
Meanwhile, the decline in liver function that occurs continuously without coupled with lifestyle changes is a high risk for causing malignant tumors in the liver which become the forerunner of cancer. Liver cancer until the last few decades is still categorized as "the disease of the parents". But in recent years there has been an increase in cases in people aged 20 to 30.
How to prevent it?
1. Introducing a healthy lifestyle as early as possible
The age of children and adolescents is the most optimal period of growth and development process. Nutritional intake from food is really needed to support the process, but of course there are rules for the game.
Get children to eat regularly and fill their food plates with balanced nutrition from a variety of healthy food sources. Also get used to children to balance their eating habits with regular physical activity to burn excess calories.
The healthy lifestyle pattern that is applied as early as possible helps more disciplined children grow up later.
2. Changing people's perceptions that obese children are not always healthy
Often we hear that fat children are funny and adorable. This view is not totally wrong, but we still have to consider the health effects of obesity in children.
The important thing to note is the ideal weight gain of children according to age.
