Introduction
Childhood Obesity as a System Problem. Childhood obesity is a social epidemic [1],[2] that persists from childhood to adolescence and well into adulthood. Energy-intake and energy-expenditure-related behaviors – diet and physical activities – form the core of the energy-balance equation. These behaviors are heavily influenced by a complex set of interrelated psychosocial, biological, and ecological variables. The recent literature is beginning to recognize the need to study it in terms of multiple chains of causal influences flowing from distal social factors to proximate, individual factors and behaviors, and in terms of drivers of change in trends and patterns over time. This ecological, multilevel perspective calls for the analysis of obesity as a complex system that involves information collected from multiple sources and at multiple time points.
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Ip, E.H., Zhang, Q., Williamson, D. (2012). Dynamic Multi-chain Graphical Model for Psychosocial and Behavioral Profiles in Childhood Obesity. In: Yang, S.J., Greenberg, A.M., Endsley, M. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral - Cultural Modeling and Prediction. SBP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7227. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29047-3_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29047-3_22
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