Health care | Obesity | Report

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
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Introduction:
The incidence of obesity among children has increased significantly in the past few years.
According to the World Health Organization (2020) report, 40 million children aged above the
age of 18 years were found to be overweight or obese in 2018 and more than 340 million
children and adolescents aged 5-19 years were obese in 2016. Other reasons for concern is that
obesity is not associated with increase in medical co-morbidities, but also an accumulation of
body fats and progressive decline in physical activity (Ceschia et al., 2016). Hence, there is high
likelihood of impaired physical fitness due to deleterious effects of obesity in children. Due to
various links between childhood obesity and physical activity, the aim of this literature review is
to investigate about the relation between physical exercise and obesity in children. The literature
review will focus on evaluating the efficacy of exercise on reducing BMI and reducing adverse
consequences.
Literature review:
As the rate of childhood obesity in increasing, the Hong Kong government has taken the
initiative to foster lifestyle habit in children and prevent obesity by creating a favourable
environment for physical activity in child care centres and pre-primary institutions (Hong Kong
Government Department of Health., 2018). The main focus on physical activity has emerged
because physical inactivity has been identified as major risk factors for obesity in children
(Jelalian & Sato, 2012). Lee and Yoon (2018) established the link between physical activity and
obesity prevention by exploring about key risk factors. Lee and Yoon (2018) explained about the
imbalance between caloric intake and physical activity as the cause behind childhood obesity.
For example, high consumption of food and sugar sweetened beverage is directly linked to

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childhood obesity epidemic. In addition to diet, other behavioural risk factors included lack of
physical activity. This was confirmed by citing evidence for decrease in obesity risk by
engagement in one hour of moderate level physical activity per day. In case of children, the
scope of supervised physical activity was explained. Compared to this study, the study by
Remmers et al. (2014) explain about the link between physical activity and obesity by measuring
changes in BMI post PA. By conducting a prospective study with 470 children, the study
revealed decrease in BMI due to increase in moderate to vigorous physical activity. Thus,
physical activity can become a major tool for improving BMI in younger children. The strength
of the study by Remmers et al. (2014) is that it had large sample size and it included valid tool
for measurement of PA. However, no evidence for statistical significant relation between PA and
BMI was found. Thus, to generalize the findings, evaluating more studies with different workout
regimen for children is necessary.
With the increase in public health efforts towards increasing physical activity to reduce
childhood obesity, various studies have been conducted to explore the effectiveness of different
exercise or workout regimen on children. According to Dudziak et al. (2018), it was found that 8
week work out for children aged 9 to 12 years was associated with decrease in percentage body
fat, reduction in visceral fat and decrease in BMI. Through these outcomes, positive changes in
body composition through the effect of exercise were seen. Tan et al. (2017) found that 10 weeks
of supervised moderate intensity exercise training in 5 year old obese and lean children
significantly decreased BMI, percentage of body fat and body mass. Along with improve in body
compositions like BMI, the beneficial effect of physical activity were found on systolic blood
pressure level and heart rate composition. This study revealed moderate intensity exercise as a
safe intervention for children. In contrast to the above two study, Kondiboyina et al. (2020) gave