Abstract
Despite extensive public health and clinical interventions, obesity rates remain high,
and evidence-based preventive strategies are elusive. Many consensus guidelines suggest
that providers should screen all children after age 2 years for obesity by measuring
height and weight, calculating body mass index (BMI), and sensitively communicating
weight status in the context of health to the family at each visit. However, preventive
counseling should begin in infancy and focus on healthy feeding, activity, and family
lifestyle behaviors. For children with overweight or obesity, the American Academy
of Pediatrics outlines 4 stages of treatment: 1) Primary care providers should offer
“prevention plus,” the use of motivational interviewing to achieve healthy lifestyle
modifications in family behaviors or environments; 2) children requiring the next
level of obesity treatment, structured weight management, need additional support
beyond the primary care provider (such as a dietitian, physical therapist, or mental
health counselor) and more structured goal setting with the team, including providers
adept at weight management counseling; 3) children with severe obesity and motivated
families may benefit from referral to a comprehensive multidisciplinary intervention,
such as an obesity treatment clinic; and 4) tertiary care interventions are provided
in a multidisciplinary pediatric obesity treatment clinic with standard clinical protocols
for evaluation of interventions, including medications and surgery. Although it is
certainly a challenge for providers to fit in all the desired prevention and treatment
counseling during preventive health visits, by beginning to provide anticipatory guidance
at birth, providers can respond to parents’ questions, add to parents’ knowledge base,
and partner with parents and children and adolescents to help them grow up healthy.
This is especially important in an increasingly toxic food environment with numerous
incentives and messages to eat unhealthfully, barriers to appropriate physical activity,
and concomitant stigma about obesity. Focusing on key nutrition and physical activity
habits and establishing these healthy behaviors at an early age will allow children
to develop a healthy growth trajectory. However, much more work is needed to determine
the best evidence-based practices for providers to counsel families on improving target
behaviors, environmental modifications, and parenting skills and to decrease abundant
disparities in obesity prevalence and treatment.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: May 28, 2018
Accepted:
May 12,
2018
Received:
September 26,
2017
Footnotes
☆The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Identification
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Academic Pediatric Association
