WEB DESK, July 12(ABC): Despite national school and community-based efforts to promote healthy behaviors at a young age, childhood obesity is becoming more common in the United States, a recent study found.
The research, published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics, followed two nationally representative groups of children from kindergarten to fifth grade — around ages 6 to 11. The first group was studied from 1998 to 2004, and the second group was studied from 2010 to 2016.
The difference between the two groups was striking: Around 16.2% of children who did not have weight issues when they entered kindergarten in 2010 were obese by the end of fifth grade, compared with 15.5% of participants in the same BMI category who started in 1998. Additionally, children studied in 2010 became obese at younger ages than their predecessors in the 1998 group.
In both groups, children who were overweight during their preschool years had a significantly higher risk of obesity than their peers who were not, researchers found.
“Once you get on that train towards elevated weight gain, it’s really hard to turn it around, so prevention of overweight and obesity really early on are so important,” said Solveig Argeseanu Cunningham, first author of the study and associate professor of global health and epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta.
Obesity occurs when a person has excessive fat accumulation that presents a health risk, according to the World Health Organization. Adults who have a body mass index (BMI) — a calculation based on one’s height and weight — over 30 are considered obese. Childhood obesity is measured not by exact BMI, but by comparison to other children of the same age and sex. Those who are in the 95th percentile of BMI for their age and sex are considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Obesity is a major underlying risk factor for many illnesses, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and severe cases of Covid-19, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“Without intervention, we will continue to see increasing prevalence and severity of obesity for children at a younger age, which has really negative consequences down the line, not just for these children, but also for their future offspring,” said Dr. Jennifer Woo Baidal, director of the Pediatric Obesity Initiative at Columbia University in New York City. She was not involved in the study.