There is no doubt that both are needed in addressing the childhood obesity epidemic. But each can lead to personal and social consequences different from those of the other. This metaphor Selleckchem 3-Methyladenine implies that overweight and obesity are sicknesses and require medical attention. It sends, rightly so, a strong message to those who are suffering from excessive body weight and obesity that they need to seek medical help. Exercise is conveyed to be an effective medicine one has to take in order to cure the disease. Growing out of this treatment perspective is an important hidden message

that fighting against the overweight/obesity disease is primarily a personal responsibility. That is, the individual is responsible for seeking help and following the treatment protocol. If recurrences occur,

it is the individual’s responsibility to start the treatment all over again. As the evidence in the IOM report suggests, this person-focused approach has not been successful since 1980 when the obesity rate was 15% of the population and the U.S. began the fight against obesity. The medicine metaphor may be particularly ineffective in stopping children from becoming obese adults. Using an unscientific calculation, one can conclude that among the two thirds obese U.S. adults, one half of them were not overweight or obese in their childhood and/or adolescent years (2–19 years of age). A reasoning may also lead to a conclusion that under the treatment approach, Rebamipide one third of the obese children lost the battle after they became adults. Could they have been successful Selleck KPT 330 if they had not been left to themselves (and their families) to figure out necessary knowledge, skill, and motivation to fend off gradual erosion of their willpower needed to maintain a healthy body weight? Because the body weight issue has become such a personal one, physical education teachers, the most likely source of help, become hesitant to overtly mention “weight control”

and “weight loss” to these children and reluctant to design individualized exercise tasks for them for the very purpose. It is not uncommon to observe in schools that overweight/obese children go along with others in physical education and display difficulties in almost all physical activity tasks. These classes and content become irrelevant for them. Consequently, the children become powerless and prone to accepting the vicious cycle of treatment-recurrence. The vaccine approach has been most effective in controlling epidemics. For example, smallpox was not controlled until the smallpox vaccine was introduced for population application and became a social and societal effort. But obesity prevention cannot be achieved through finding a magic one-shot vaccine.1 For this very reason, the vaccination metaphor actually implies a continuous social and societal effort, as the IOM report openly indicates.