HEALTH Levels of obesity remain steady, researchers say

Percentages of overweight people are about twice as high as federal goals.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
In the first years of the new century, Americans -- both children and adults -- are just as overweight as they were in the last years of the 20th century, according to a new report.
"There is no indication that these trends are decreasing. The high levels of overweight among children and obesity among adults remain a major public health concern," said Allison Hedley, a researcher with the National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of the study, published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Hedley and her colleagues used the most recent national data on height and weight measurements taken for more than 8,000 adults and children in 1999 and 2000 and 2001 to 2002 to update estimates.
For adults, being overweight was defined as having a body-mass index (based on weight-to-height ratio) greater than 25 but less than 30, the threshold for obesity. So, for example, a person 5-foot-8 weighing 209 pounds or more would be considered obese. The system assumes that most people carry a certain proportion of body fat -- it doesn't necessarily apply to athletes who carry a lot of muscle.
Among children, being overweight was defined as being at or above the 95th percentile of a growth chart that tracks a sex-specific body-mass index according to age.
Overall, the researchers found that between 1999 and 2002, 65.1 percent of adults age 20 and older were overweight or obese, and 30.4 percent of those were obese. For children ages 6 through 19, 16 percent were overweight.
Government's goals
All those measurements are at least twice as high as the government's public-health goals for the population within six years: 15 percent obesity among adults; 5 percent for children.
"Children who are overweight have an almost 70 percent likelihood of growing up to be adults that are overweight, even 80 percent when there is a family history [parents] with obesity," said Dr. George Mensah, acting director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Thirty years ago, 80 percent of children played sports every day; recent surveys show that 20 percent of children do so now. And the share of calories children get from fast food has increased from 2 percent to 15 percent during the same period.
"We all want to take this seriously and we don't want our kids having heart attacks in their 20s, yet this is a reality," said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston, during a Capitol Hill forum on obesity policy that discussed the findings last week. He has researched the effects of what he calls a "toxic environment" of snack foods, sedentary lifestyle and poorly supervised eating by children.
The JAMA study found there was no significant difference in the prevalence of obesity among men of different ages or racial and ethnic groups. But among women aged 20 and older, there were considerable differences along ethnic lines: non-Hispanic white women had the lowest obesity rate (30.7), followed by Mexican-Americans at 38.4 percent and non-Hispanic black women, 49 percent.