LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge has launched a new initiative aimed at helping reduce obesity in children.
The center released its new Childhood Obesity Treatment Toolkit Thursday. It gives the state’s primary care physicians tactics for evaluating childhood obesity and approaches to treatment. The center is distributing more than 2,000 toolkits statewide, according to Pennington’s pediatric obesity researcher Dr. Amanda Staiano.
“We’ve realized from our pediatrician friends around the state that many of them didn’t receive medical education related to how to treat childhood obesity. Obesity has really become a serious problem in the past 15-20 years. So this is a way to catch them up,” Staiano said.
Louisiana tops the nation in childhood obesity. Staiano says one in two Louisiana children is overweight or obese. It’s a struggle, according to Staiano, for pediatricians to lay out a plan and delve deeper into the culprits during a checkup.
“I think many pediatricians feel that they only have time to plot the child’s weight on a growth chart and maybe give a couple tips related to healthy eating and physical activity. But, what this toolkit does is show there really needs to be several stages of treatment, especially for children who don’t respond to advice here and there,” Staiano said.
This toolkit took Staiano and her colleagues about a year to develop after a thorough review of the current literature. It stresses the importance of family involvement in health, including encouraging parents to model healthy eating and a physically active lifestyle. It also focuses on self-monitoring and goal setting, while integrating technology such as smartphone apps, pedometers and text messaging to motivate patients.Childhood obesity toolkit piece
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