Word: childhood
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...that our children are hardly exempt. Rising obesity threatens to condemn a significant share of the next generation to a lifetime of weight-related disease, overburdening the already struggling U.S. health-care system. Though a recent study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers found that childhood-obesity levels may finally have leveled off, more than 30% of American schoolchildren are still overweight, with little indication that rates will drop anytime soon. The CDC defines as overweight those children with a body mass index (BMI)--a rough factoring of height and weight--higher than the 85th percentile...
...look at--and attack--obesity. We tend not to talk about a problem like body weight in the language of infectious disease, but scientists do, knowing that like any other epidemic, the U.S.'s obesity scourge hits some communities harder than others. The skyrocketing increase in childhood obesity--the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds classified as obese has nearly tripled since 1980--may argue strongly that the American environment has changed in a way that makes gaining weight much less avoidable. But the uneven distribution of the problem argues that who you are, where...
...environment makes it easier or harder for healthy choices to be the default choices," says Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which last year pledged $500 million to end the rise in childhood obesity by 2015. "And adults create the environment that kids live...
...geography of childhood obesity is largely the geography of poverty. There's no pretending that the problem--and resultant disparities in income, education and opportunity--will be easy to address, but there's no denying that it's imperative that we try. "It's the poorest and most deprived neighborhoods that suffer the most," says Adam Drewnowski, director of the nutritional-science program at the University of Washington. "This has to be fixed...
Ludwig's clinic at children's hospital, Optimal Weight for Life, offers a glimpse of the diversity of childhood obesity in the U.S. The clinic straddles the border between the wealthy neighborhood of Brookline and the poorer areas of Roxbury and Dorchester, and Ludwig's patients--black, white, Hispanic--are drawn from around the city. Ludwig's unique weight-control program focuses on the glycemic index of his patients' diets, attempting to reduce the sharp ups and downs in blood-sugar levels that he believes encourage children to overeat. That means cutting back severely on the highly processed carbohydrates that...