Word: childhood
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Hannah McGoey, unfortunately, is a rare exception to what is rapidly becoming a global epidemic of childhood obesity. More and more countries around the world--even some that have been struggling to prevent starvation--are now wrestling with the dangers of excessive nutrition. The U.S. continues to lead the way, with as many as 37% of its children and adolescents carrying around too much fat. But other countries are rapidly catching up. According to statistics presented recently at the European Congress on Obesity in Helsinki, Finland, more than 20% of European youngsters between the ages...
...These figures should set alarm bells ringing in ministries of health across the developed and developing world," says Tim Lobstein, co-editor of a forthcoming report to the World Health Organization on childhood obesity. And with good reason: people who are obese as children have a high risk of becoming obese adults--meaning they will have a much higher risk than their slender counterparts of contracting a broad range of debilitating diseases, including heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and cancer. The surge of obesity among children, in short, presages a global explosion of illnesses that will drain economies, create enormous suffering...
...Europe in its obesity statistics, but Thailand, Malaysia, Japan and the Philippines have all reported troubling increases in recent years. In China, where a one-child-per-family policy has created millions of spoiled and overnourished children (feeding a phenomenon known as little-emperor syndrome), the rise in childhood obesity is particularly alarming. Up to 10% of China's 290 million children are believed to be overweight or obese, and that percentage is expected to have doubled a decade from...
...withers and dies. Other non-Quimby strips from the same period appear in the book and contain straight autobiography juxtaposed to comicbook tropes. One remarkable piece appears to be a superhero story, but all the words, including the onomatopoeia, read together as a short memoir of the author's childhood. But none of it gets lugubrious, since Ware remains at bottom a humor cartoonist. Painfully funny, his sharp wit specializes in an alternative kind of schadenfreude: a kind where we feel we are laughing at our own misery...
Everyone talks about it, but now pediatricians say they are determined to do something about it--the epidemic of childhood obesity, that is. In a no-nonsense policy statement devoted to the growing problem, the American Academy of Pediatrics has called for its members to go beyond their routine tracking of height and weight. Pediatricians are being urged to identify children most at risk for obesity (taking into account birth weight, family history, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and other factors), then carefully track their body mass index--a ratio of weight to height--and watch for significant changes from year...