Childhood Obesity Rate In U.S. Slows Down

After years of skyrocketing growth, the rate of childhood obesity appears to have slowed down, a team of US researchers said on Tuesday, offering a glimmer of hope.

However, the level is still more than three times than it was in the 1970s, they said.

After analyzing the data gathered from 1999 to 2006, the researchers’ team, led by Cynthia Ogden of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noticed obesity rates essentially unchanged among boys and girls ages 2 to 19 during that period.

In their study, based on data from tens of thousands of children, Ogden and colleagues found that the percentage of obese youngsters has been roughly stable since 1999 in every age and racial group they surveyed.

They found that more than 23 million, or 32 percent of children and teens ages 2 to 19 fit the government's definition of being overweight compared with 29 percent in 1999, while about 16 percent of kids ages 2 and older were obese in 2003-2006 compared with 14 percent in 1999-2000 and 11 percent were extremely obese

"It looks like childhood obesity is leveling off after 20 years of growth," says lead researcher Ogden. "We can be cautiously optimistic that things are beginning to stabilize with kids, but these percentages are still higher than they should be."

The findings, based on measurements of 8,165 children and adolescents who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2003-2006, are published in Wednesday’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Calling the findings “encouraging”, Dr. David Ludwig, director of an obesity clinic at Children's Hospital Boston said, “After 25 years of extraordinarily bad news about childhood obesity, this study provides a glimmer of hope,” but he said that “it's too soon to know if this really means we're beginning to make meaningful inroads into this epidemic."

With obesity becoming an increasingly large problem in the United States, the fresh findings provide a sigh of relief to the health authorities who are greatly worried about Obesity epidemic in U.S. kids.

Parents in the United States are worried about their kids’ extra pounds, as it is known that fatness is the gateway to other related problems like increase in blood pressure, weak hips and ankles, diabetes and breathing problems. Super-size meals and lack of exercise are some widely known factors that can dramatically increase the body fat.

American Obesity Association (AOA) has described the obesity on its Website as a complex, multi-factorial chronic disease involving environmental (social and cultural), genetic, physiologic, metabolic, behavioral and psychological components. It is the second leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.
A person is classified as ‘obese’ if his or her body mass index (BMI) is 30 or over. BMI is a standard obesity measure that divides the weight by the square of the height. BMI is a simple and frequently used method for estimating body fat:

A BMI less than 18.5 is ‘underweight’
A BMI of 18.5 - 24.9 is ‘normal weight’
A BMI of 25.0 - 29.9 is ‘overweight’
A BMI of 30.0 - 39.9 is ‘obese’
A BMI of 40.0 or higher is ‘severely (or morbidly) obese’.