Obesity among the American teenage population is no laughing matter -- more and more kids seem to be packing on the extra pounds these days. What is to blame? Overzealous junk food marketers, a preponderance of fast food and many other items, that's what.

What can parents do about it? An obese teen is sure to be ridiculed by peers as well as have possible health problems, so the disadvantages of being an obese teenager can have both mental and physical consequences. In other words, the obese teen can suffer from many angles. Parents, once informed on how to help, can be a huge influence in this area, though.

If you're the parent of an obese teen and need to find a guidebook to help you with your child's situation, Weight Loss Confidential may just be your ticket. A great review of the book appears here, and it may just be the most important book you read this year.

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Are more U.S. teens electing to have obesity surgery these days? According to many reports, this is indeed the case. But, are teens exposing themselves to unneeded risks by doing so?

A new five-year study will look at the benefits and risks of bariatric surgery on adolescents, something that is probably overdue as more people (younger people) have surgery to help them lose all those pounds.

The purpose of this study that will take until 2012 is to find out if adults and adolescents who have bariatric surgery have different health problems -- and it surgery is more beneficial if had earlier in life.

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In what looks like a model program for teenagers grappling with weight issues, specialists at Children's Hospital of Iowa are offering the Better Eating, Stronger Teens (BEST) program for seventh- through 12th-grade girls.

The program is for those girls who are overweight or at risk for being overweight. This is needed for both boys and girls in many ways, but for a pilot program, I think something of this magnitude is fantastic. The program will extend to boys after the 10-week pilot ends as well.

The program involves twice-weekly exercise sessions as well as group sessions that focus around issues surrounding eating and exercise -- two large contributors to weight problems in most of the teenage obese I'll bet.

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Are kids and teens these days getting fatter? In almost every sense of the word, as a random sampling from a few weeks ago at a skating rink proved my point. Kids that would be considered obese made up about 25% of all the kids I witnessed. Staggering, really.

And then I read this today -- which says the number of U.S. children having obesity surgery has tripled in recent years. What does this all mean? Well, operations like gastric bypass surgery will become more common -- even for kids.

So this is what many kids have come to -- a major surgery to curb eating habits? Gastric bypass did not even exist 20 years ago for kids -- so what has changed? Lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle and eating junk foods day and night -- that's what. Unfortunately, I see the problem getting worse before it gets better. Do you?

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Many of us have seen kids 99 ours or others -- spends hours in front of the television watching programs and more recently, playing endless video games. There are some parents that attribute kids getting fatter due to this displacement of television over physical exercise.

But, U.S. researchers said just this morning that getting children to switch off the television does not guarantee they will exercise more.

The conclusions came after a four-year study of more than 10,000 U.S. children aged 10 to 15. The researchers said that they found no correlation between changes in the amount of time they spent in sedentary activities and time engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity.

Want the details on the results of the study?

• More than 10,000 girls and boys answered annual questionnaires for the study, which found girls spent a mean of nearly 10 hours a week watching television per week and boys nearly 12 hours a week. Girls were physically active for 12 hours a week and boys for 14 hours.

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With much of the American population overweight or obese these days, is there a time in the lives of girls and boys when the habits that lead to added weight start to form solidly?

A new report find that girls at least are most likely to gain weight early in adolescence. In effect, girls between the ages of 9 and 12 gain weight at those ages which lasts into later teenage years -- and for some, much later in life.

In fact, a research nutritionist that contributed to the report stated "This shows that obesity and other risk factors for heart disease track from younger to older. This is a wake-up call for policymakers, for schools, for parents." Because if these habits begin earlier and last for a long time, chances are they'll be so hard to break that they won't be.

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In the eyes of teenagers, image is a good part of one's identity during those hard-to-pass years. Teenage girls who weight themselves often may even be more likely to take up unhealthy weight-control habits according to a new study.

With perception and image being of utmost importance, the topsy-turvy world of many teenage girls -- who I fear try to be like the media wants them to be (perfect, slim and happy all the time) -- can be turned upside down often if they continuously weight themselves and then get bad habits going like binge-eating and risky weight-control tactics such as skipping meals and using diet pills.

The researchers concluded that "Our findings suggest that for the general population of adolescents, self-weighing is not helpful, and it may be harmful for adolescent girls."

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