What should parents do if kids are obese?
The shift in thinking was the hard part. After that, it was a piece of cake. Scratch that. More like a bowlful of a favorite fruit or a moderately sized, but still-tantalizing dessert. Everett Greenleaf, a father of two living in Troy, Mich., chuckles after making the joke. “Our eating habits — though they aren’t the best and we’re not skinny and we’re not going to be on a cover of a magazine anytime soon — well, we know what foods are good and what foods are not,” he says. Like many parents, Greenleaf knows that America’s kids are bulking up to unhealthy sizes. In fact, 1 in 6 is considered obese these days — a threefold increase since 1980, according to a recent report by the U.S. Surgeon General. He turned to Beaumont Hospitals’ Healthy Kids Program last year to learn more about healthy eating habits and to chip away at some of the family’s extra pounds. It’s a plight that physician T. Jann Caison-Sorey sees all too often. “One of the greatest fights I fight as a primary care physic
