Childhood obesity is a huge problem

Childhood obesity is a huge problem. It's thought around 1 in 4 children is either overweight or obese and that number seems to be rising each year. What's even more worrying is the number of kids that are called 'morbidly obese.' One hospital is so alarmed by what it's seeing it has gone out and hired a specialist to deal with the problem.

What is Australia's biggest killer? Is it snakes? Sharks? Road accidents? Not even close. It's heart disease and it kills 48,000 people each year and one of its biggest causes is this - Obesity.

NATHAN BAZLEY, REPORTER: You guys don't have to worry about that just yet, because you still have heaps of time to do something about it. But the problem is, instead of getting skinnier, Australian kids are putting on more weight every day!

Every year the statistics get worse. These days, a quarter of kids are either overweight or obese. It's become such a problem that a hospital in Sydney has hired this special kid's obesity expert, Dr Shirley Alexander.

They think it's the first time in the world someone has been given this kind of job, but that's not a good achievement. She was hired because the number of kids needing treatment for obesity at the hospital has exploded, from 17 to 90 a year!

But we're not talking about kids that are a little overweight. The children are classified as morbidly obese.

Morbidly means that their weight is making them very very unhealthy and if they're not given help soon, their lives could be a lot shorter.

So what do these guys do to help? Well they say the main problem is diet, so they work with the whole family to make sure they're all helping each other make good food choices.

But it's not just kids having trouble making good choices. Adults in Australia are having huge problems too.

It's become so bad, that many are turning to a much more drastic solution. Latest figures show surgery to control weight problems has risen by around twenty times in the last twenty years.

The main type of surgery is called lap band.

NATHAN BAZLEY, REPORTER: This is very much like what your stomach looks like and when you eat, it expands, gets full, then tells your brain to stop eating. What lap band surgery does is place a band just around the top bit of the stomach, so that we get full much much quicker.

That means our stomachs tell our brains we're full earlier, so we eat heaps less.

In real life it looks something like this.

There are a few big issues with surgery like this though. First off it has risks and it's pretty expensive.

The second thing is that it doesn't solve the main problem, so patients still have to learn to make good food choices and exercise.

It's also not advisable for children to get lap band surgery, because they are still growing.

So while this quick-fix might look like a great solution, the best way to stop a cause of our number one killer is good food and some fun exercise!