Interview with Charles Snyder

Prepared by Michael Wilkin
Jon Nowakowski and I interviewed Dr. Charles Snyder on April 14, 2010. Dr. Snyder was very excited when we told him about our social justice project on obesity, specifically focused on childhood obesity. He is well experienced in this area since he works with children on a daily basis and sees the effect of fast food and lack of physical activity. He explained to us the effects of obesity on the body on the short term and long term effects.
Dr. Snyder was very into the conversation providing us a lot of information about obesity. He was very open to our questions and was quite welcoming when we met. As we explained to him our motives he opened up and was very helpful. He explained to us that we had chosen a very good topic to do our project on since it has really begun to be reformed.
He told us about how fast food/ junk food and the lack of physical activity amongst the nation’s youth are causing more and more children to become obese. He continued to say that now a day more kids are sitting around playing video games and their parents are letting them sit around and do this for hours on end. He then compared this to how this was not the case some 20 to 30 years ago. Those who 50+ years of age are more active out enjoying life while the youth of this nation, who are just sitting around playing videogames. Most of this information we learned from our reading.
I was surprised to learn that obesity is genetic. Although genetics are a factor it’s not a key factor. I thought that it was a major contributor but he showed me that it isn’t as big as I thought. He told us that if the parents would kick their children out of the house and not let them to play videogames obesity would not be such a problem. He explained how some people are born to be bigger than others, but physical activity and nutrition are bigger contributors to obesity. He did say that genetics will make people more prone to diabetes and heart disease but obesity will greatly increase the chances of having these issues.
I felt that this interview went really well. Dr. Snyder was a very exciting and engaging person who seemed very eager to help us out as much as he could with our project. He gave us a lot of information to work with and most of it was more in depth than we were looking for.