DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2017.v05i02.067

Pages: 638-642

Childhood obesity once considered a problem in affluent countries is now, a problem of the developing countries also. Individuals develop their eating and activity patterns during childhood and 50-80% of obese children continue to be obese adult’s .Therefore, it is important to determine the prevalence of the problem and study associated risk factors relating to overweight and obesity among adolescents. A predesigned, pretested questionnaire was used to interview the participants from 3 private English medium schools which were selected by simple random sampling (a sample size of 150 students from std. 8th, 9th and 10th). Anthropometric measurements i.e. height and weight and BMI was calculated and interpreted from WHO BMI classification for children 2007.The Data was analysed through pivot tables in Microsoft excel 2016 and Epi info Software. A total of 150 students of high school were included in the study which belonged to age group of 12 to 17 years. 45.33% students were females and 54.66% students were males.34.7% students were underweight, 51.3% students were normal, 12% students were overweight and 2% students were obese. About 6.67% females were found to be overweight or obese and 7.33% males were overweight and obese. P-value for risk factors i.e. consumption of fast food, binge eating and family history of overweight was 0.000 , 0.000 and 0.00518 respectively which were highly significant. Other risk factors had p-value >0.05 which were not significant and thus not contributing to obesity in our study. Habits like binge eating, fast food consumption and also presence of family history of disease significantly contributes more to the problem of obesity. Educating the community on the aspects of healthy food habits and desired lifestyles is the need of the hour.