Children’s health in the United States has improved dramatically over the past century. Vaccines targeting previously common childhood infections—such as measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, rubella, and Haemophilus influenza—have nearly eliminated these scourges. Through the widespread availability of potable water, improved sanitation, and antibiotics, diarrheal diseases and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia have diminished in frequency and as primary causes of infant and child deaths in the United States (CDC, 1999). Pervasive food scarcity and essential vitamin and mineral deficiencies have largely disappeared in the U.S. population (IOM, 1991; Kessler, 1995). The net result is that infant mortality has been lowered by over 90 percent, contributing to the substantial increase in life expectancy—more than 30 years—since 1900 (CDC, 1999). Innovations such as seatbelts, child car seats, and bike helmets, meanwhile, have contributed to improved children’s safety, and fluoridation of municipal drinking water has enhanced child and adolescent dentition (CDC, 1999).  Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay.

Given this steady trajectory toward a healthier childhood and healthier children, we begin the 21st century with a startling setback—an epidemic¹ of childhood obesity. This epidemic is occurring in boys and girls in all 50 states, in younger children as well as in adolescents, across all socioeconomic strata, and among all ethnic groups—though specific subgroups, including African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians, are disproportionately affected (Ogden et al., 2002; Caballero et al., 2003). At a time when we have learned that excess weight has significant and troublesome health consequences, we nevertheless see our population, in general, and our children, in particular, gaining weight to a dangerous degree and at an alarming rate.

The increasing prevalence of childhood obesity throughout the United States has led policy makers to rank it as a critical public health threat for the 21st century (Koplan and Dietz, 1999; Mokdad et al., 1999, 2000; DHHS, 2001). Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay. Over the past three decades since the 1970s, the prevalence of childhood obesity (defined in this report as a gender- and age-specific body mass index [BMI] at or above the 95th percentile on the 2000 CDC BMI charts) has more than doubled for preschool children aged 2 to 5 years and adolescents aged 12 to 19 years, and it has more than tripled for children aged 6 to 11 years (see Chapter 2; Ogden et al., 2002). Approximately nine million American children over 6 years of age are already considered obese. These trends mirror a similar profound increase in U.S. adult obesity and co-morbidities over a comparable time frame, as well as a concurrent rise in the prevalence of childhood and adult obesity and related chronic diseases internationally, in developed and developing countries alike (WHO, 2002, 2003; Lobstein et al., 2004).

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILDREN AND SOCIETY AT LARGE

Many of us consider our weight and height as personal statistics, primarily our own, and occasionally our physician’s concern. Our weight is something we approximate on forms and applications requiring this information. Body size has been a cosmetic issue rather than a health issue throughout most of human history, but scientific study has changed this view. One’s aesthetic preference for a lean versus a plump body type may be related to personal taste, cultural and social norms, and association of body type with wealth or well-being. However, the implications of a wholesale increase in BMIs are increasingly becoming a public health problem. Thus, we need to acknowledge the sensitive personal dimension of height and weight, while also viewing weight as a public health issue, especially as the weight levels of children, as a population, are proceeding on a harmful upward trajectory.

The as yet unabated epidemic of childhood obesity has significant ramifications for children’s physical health, both in the immediate and long term, given that obesity is linked to several chronic disease risks. In a population-based sample, approximately 60 percent of obese children aged 5 to 10 years had at least one physiological cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factor—such as elevated total cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin, or blood pressure—and 25 percent had two or more CVD risk factors (Freedman et al., 1999).

The increasing incidence of type 2 diabetes in young children (previously known as adult onset diabetes) is particularly startling. For individuals born in the United States in 2000, the lifetime risk of being diagnosed with diabetes at some point in their lives is estimated at 30 percent for boys and 40 percent for girls if obesity rates level off (Narayan et al., 2003).² The estimated lifetime risk for developing diabetes is even higher among ethnic minority groups at birth and at all ages (Narayan et al., 2003). Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay. Type 2 diabetes is rapidly becoming a disease of children and adolescents. In case reports limited to the 1990s, type 2 diabetes accounted for 8 to 45 percent of all new childhood cases of diabetes—in contrast with fewer than 4 percent before the 1990s (Fagot-Campagna et al., 2000). Young people are also at risk of developing serious psychosocial burdens related to being obese in a society that stigmatizes this condition, often fostering shame, self-blame, and low self-esteem that may impair academic and social functioning and carry into adulthood (Schwartz and Puhl, 2003).

The growing obesity epidemic in children, and in adults, affects not only the individual’s physical and mental health but carries substantial direct and indirect costs for the nation’s economy as discrimination, economic disenfranchisement, lost productivity, disability, morbidity, and premature death take their tolls (Seidell, 1998). States and communities are obliged to divert resources to prevention and treatment, and the national health-care system is burdened with the co-morbidities of obesity such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, CVD, osteoarthritis, and cancer (Ebbeling et al., 2002).

The obesity epidemic may reduce overall adult life expectancy (Fontaine et al., 2003) because it increases lifetime risk for type 2 diabetes and other serious chronic disease conditions (Narayan et al., 2003), thereby potentially reversing the positive trend achieved with the reduction of infectious diseases over the past century. The great advances of genetics and other biomedical discoveries could be more than offset by the burden of illness, disability, and death caused by too many people eating too much and moving too little over their lifetimes. Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay.

Aside from the statistics, we can see the evidence of childhood obesity in our community schoolyards, in shopping malls, and in doctors’ offices. There are confirmatory journalistic reports of the epidemiologic trends in weight—from resizing of clothing to larger coffins to more spacious easy chairs to the increased need for seatbelt extenders. These would be of passing interest and minimal importance were it not for the considerable health implications of this weight gain for both adults and children. For example, compared with adults of normal weight, adults with a BMI of 40 or more have a seven-fold increased risk for diagnosed diabetes (Mokdad et al., 2003). Indeed, the obesity epidemic places at risk the long-term welfare and readiness of the U.S. military services by reducing the pool of individuals eligible for recruitment and decreasing the retention of new recruits. Nearly 80 percent of recruits who exceed the military accession weight-for-height standards at entry leave the military before they complete their first term of enlistment (IOM, 2003).

What might our population look like in the year 2025 if we continue on this course? In a land of excess calories ingested and insufficient energy expended, the inevitable scenario is a continued increase in average body size and an altered concept of what is “normal.” Americans with a BMI below 30 will be considered small and obesity will no longer be newsworthy but accepted as the social norm.

While the existence and importance of the increase in the population-wide obesity problem are no longer debated, we are still mustering the determination to forge effective solutions.Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay.  We must remind ourselves that social changes to transform public perceptions and behaviors regarding seatbelt use, smoking cessation, breastfeeding, and recycling would have sounded unreasonable just a few decades ago (Economos et al., 2001), yet we have acted vigorously and with impressive results. How to proceed similarly in meeting the formidable childhood obesity challenge is the focus of this Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.

The 19-member IOM committee was charged with developing a prevention-focused action plan to decrease the prevalence of obesity in children and youth in the United States. The primary emphasis of the committee’s task was on examining the behavioral and cultural factors, social constructs, and other broad environmental factors involved in childhood obesity and identifying promising approaches for prevention efforts. This report presents the committee’s recommendations for many different segments of society from federal, state, and local governments (Chapter 4), to industry and media (Chapter 5), local communities (Chapter 6), schools (Chapter 7), and parents and families (Chapter 8). Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay.

CONTEXTS FOR ACTION

Investigating the causes of childhood obesity, determining what to do about them, and taking appropriate action must address the variables that influence both eating and physical activity. Seemingly straightforward, these variables result from complex interactions across a number of relevant social, economic, cultural, environmental, and policy contexts.

U.S. children live in a society that has changed dramatically in the three decades over which the obesity epidemic has developed. Many of these changes, such as both parents working outside the home, often affect decisions about what children eat, where they eat, how much they eat, and the amount of energy they expend in school and leisure time activities (Ebbeling et al., 2002; Hill et al., 2003).

Other changes, such as the increasing diversity of the population, influence cultural views and marketing patterns. Lifestyle modifications, in part the result of media usage and content together with changes in the physical design of communities, affect adults’ and children’s levels of physical activity. Many of the social and cultural characteristics that the U.S. population has accepted as a normal way of life may collectively contribute to the growing levels of childhood obesity.Medical Statistics of Obesity in Children Essay.  The broad societal trends that impact weight outcomes are complex and clearly multifactorial. With such societal changes, it is difficult to tease out the quantitative and qualitative role of individual contributing factors. While distinct causal relationships may be difficult to prove, the dramatic rise in childhood obesity prevalence must be viewed within the context of these broad societal changes.

An understanding of these contexts, particularly regarding their potential to be modified and how they may facilitate or impede development of a comprehensive obesity prevention strategy, is therefore essential. This next section provides a useful background to understand the multidimensional nature of the childhood obesity epidemic.