Overweight Children Tend to Turn into Overweight Adults

Obesity has increased greatly in recent years, leading the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (CDC) call its rise "an epidemic rate during the past 20 years."

In 2000, 30 percent of U.S. adults 20 and older _ nearly 59 million people _ were obese, and 64 percent of adults 20 and over were overweight, according to CDC figures.

People are considered obese if their body mass index (BMI), a weight-to-height ratio, is 30 or higher. Several websites calculate BMI automatically for you, including the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the CDC, and give normal, overweight and obese ranges for BMI. The figures are not exact calculations of healthy and unhealthy weight, but they are useful guidelines

Obesity is associated with many health risks, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and osteoarthritis.

Epidemiologists have been increasingly focusing on a life course approach to disease. That approach has revealed the importance of childhood and adolescence in the development of risk factors and subsequent diseases in adulthood.

The life course approach notes that the nature of one’s aging is related to characteristics displayed much earlier in life.

The relationship of being overweight in childhood to severe obesity in adulthood was examined in a study by Dr. Kenneth F. Ferraro and his associates at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. They also studied at what age in life severe obesity is most prevalent.

They studied nearly 7,000 noninstitutionalized participants who were members of a national survey conducted from 1971-75. The participants ranged in age from 25 to 74 at that time. The survivors were surveyed again in 1982, 1987, and 1992.

In the first two surveys weight and height were measured for each participant by the survey staff. In later surveys the participants reported their weight themselves.

The participants were also asked about their weight during their childhood _ whether they had been considered "skinny, slender, average, chubby, or very heavy."

Participants who reported being either chubby (10.1 percent) or very heavy (1 percent) were classified as having been overweight.

Participants who reported being overweight in childhood were likely to continue to be overweight as adults. This was true for both men and women, but especially so for men, even though the overall incidence of obesity in adulthood was higher for women than for men.

More than 14 percent of the overweight children became severely obese as adults compared to 4 percent of normal weight children. Regardless of the sex of the participants, severe obesity in adulthood increased the risk of death.

Especially frightening is the realization that the participants in this study were born between the years 1897 and 1946. Being overweight was far less prevalent among children born during that time than for children today.

Over the years the consumption of fast foods and carbonated beverages has increased greatly for children _ current CDC figures estimate that at least 15 percent of children 6 to 11 years old are overweight. The increase in overweight children means that we can expect an increase in the number of overweight adults of all ages as these children grow older.

This is true unless these children do grow up to live a healthy lifestyle that includes a nutritious diet and regular exercise.

(Dr. Donald H. Kausler, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is author of "The Graying of America: An Encyclopedia of Aging, Health, Mind, and Behavior." E-mail him at dkausler2(at)aol.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)

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