Word: childhood
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...nation’s doors to millions from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. First introduced by Senator Kennedy, the Americans with Disabilities Act has broadly protected the nation’s disabled population from discrimination. He has also been the Senate’s preeminent champion of early childhood education under Head Start, of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and of the living wage...
...childhood obesity epidemic is a tsunami," says David Ludwig, an obesity researcher at Children's Hospital Boston and the co-author of the editorial. "We're beginning to see the wave hitting the shore...
Even if the childhood obesity epidemic has truly peaked, the levels remain frighteningly high. A country in which more than 30% of children are overweight is not a healthy one. Already pediatricians are diagnosing type 2 diabetes - what used to be known as adult-onset diabetes - in heavy children. And studies show that childhood obesity is significantly associated with heart disease in adulthood. The consequences for the country's already overburdened health care system - not to mention the lives of overweight and obese kids - could be catastrophic. Even if recent interventions have managed to stop the rise in childhood obesity...
Ogden wouldn't speculate as to why national childhood overweight trends appear to have stalled. It could be that kids have hit the fat ceiling - they've gotten as heavy as they're ever going to get. Or, perhaps the most obvious answer is the nationwide effort to combat obesity by getting kids - and parents - to eat better and exercise more. From Arkansas, where state officials have begun sending annual childhood health reports to parents, to Massachusetts, where the town of Somerville launched a community-wide intervention to improve the diet and fitness of children, state and local governments have...
...still far from clear that it was community intervention that blunted the childhood obesity epidemic - or that indeed the problem isn't still getting worse. Ogden admits that more time and data are needed before we can definitively argue that America's kids have stopped getting heavier. And even though the CDC data comes from an authoritative source - the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which has been ongoing since the 1960s - calculating childhood overweight rates is an inexact science. NHANES tracks kids' body mass index (BMI), a ratio of height to weight commonly used to approximate whether...