Do high schools in America have an overweight problem? Does Animo Pat Brown have an overweight problem? An obesity epidemic?

With our school being mainly Latino ethnicity and located in a typically low income neighborhood, it is very likely to be surrounded by processed foods and multiple fast food chains. This undeniably strong presence of processed food is the cause of the obesity epidemic that we have at hand. You literally just have to look around and you will see at least two overweight kids at our school. But is this really APB’s fault? There isn’t a gryphon flying around shoving takis, hot cheetos and ding dongs in students mouths.

The real question is how many students are actually eating unhealthy foods. Through a school survey performed by the 12th grade Anatomy students, Octavio, Santiago, Jennifer and Miram, it was discovered that 27.8% of students eat unhealthy food very often while 27.8% eat it often. Although these are high amounts of students, 44.4% still rarely eat unhealthy food. After food choices have been accounted for you still need to think about the amount of exercise performed. As Luis Martinez a senior stated, “The fact that some of them don’t think exercise is a necessity or that they don’t watch what they’re eating, most them just eat and eat”.

The best possible solution is to provide more students with exercise and knowledge of healthy food options. With more P.E classes this can be achieved. While looking at the current P.E students from the beginning of the year to the end there has been lots of improvement. Our current P.E teacher Mr. Brown stated, “Kids have improved without a doubt since the beginning, learning from last year I learned to push kids more in a creative way that provided joy”.

An obesity epidemic is too harsh of a phrase to use but fact that there is a unhealthy problem at our school is very evident. Students need to understand that they have to watch what they eat and perform physical activity.