Is the childhood obesity epidemic mostly media hype?

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Simplicio

Googling childhood obesity statistics turns up many graphs like this that show childhood obesity increasing and ones like this showing that US children are considerably more obese then other industrial countries (except Malta for some reason, go figure).

It must be the milkshakes.

[TriPolar]

@DSeid

Where fat is distributed matters. Obesity in a more central distribution is associated with worse health outcomes. Kids have apparently not just gotten fatter; they seem to be more likely to store more in a central obesity distribution than in times past. If true then the childhood obesity problem is worse than we have been portraying it.Backcountry Medic’s anecdotal observation has some evidenciary support and if true means that the same level of BMI defined obesity is more worrisome today than it was 30 years ago, and that concerns expressed based on the increases in BMI alone may substantially understate the real health outcomes magnitude of the problem.

Well I wanted to stay away from the issue of BMI, but there’s more evidence of it being a misleading figure. People are not built like cylinders, and belly fat has always seemed to me to be a sign of eating too much, and** doing too little**. Bolded that because that’s where so many people in this thread think the problem lies.

[Backcountry_Medic]

Yeah, I know my story can’t count for anything more than it is, just one anecdote of many that have to be compiled to get the real story.

But I can at least confirm that in my experience I went back and looked at my fifth grade picture (1992) and even only eighteen years out the children are overall smaller than today. I specifically looked for it after I saw the 180# fifth grader, because I thought to myself “Yeah, she’s big, but no more so than ‘suzie’ from my fifth grade class.” Wrong. ‘Suzie’ couldn’t have been more than 110 lbs, and now that I have a little more knowledge, she really just looks a little more mature that the other kids. But she still was obviously the biggest girl (and bigger than most boys also) in this particular photo.

There may be some changes in clothing fit that would have hidden some kids in the 80’s, but most of the kids I’m seeing couldn’t hide their waistlines in a down jacket or a sweatsuit. I think I would have noticed this when I was 10 or so, I just don’t think it was quite as prevalent then.

One thing I wonder about is how height, weight and BMI growth charts are going to deal with this over time. I seems like they usually are using somewhat recent data to determine their percentile breakdowns, but aren’t fatter kids just going to skew the distribution and/or the medians? Has this been happening yet? My data is going to get averaged closer to normal, but still it will have some slight effect on what median obesity is. I’m guessing their is some ideal that the medical community will attempt to reach, but really the charts only seem useful if they are representative of the community.

[DSeid]

@Backcountry_Medic

One thing I wonder about is how height, weight and BMI growth charts are going to deal with this over time. I seems like they usually are using somewhat recent data to determine their percentile breakdowns, but aren’t fatter kids just going to skew the distribution and/or the medians? Has this been happening yet?

The BMI percentiles are static, based on norms from several decades back; that’s how we can define obesity as being in the top 5%ile and say that 15-20% are obese. Not otherwise possible except in the Lake Woebegone clinic.

In any case your observation about weight distribution is well made and concerning.

TP, BMI may be a tool with limits but it is how obesity gets defined in medical literature so it is pretty hard to stay away from it in a discussion about obesity. The issue with possibly changing incidence of fat distribution is that population BMI changes may be underestimating the need for concern. If true the question of why fat distribution has changed is a critical one. It may indeed be related to activity … or to the sorts of food being eaten … or to some other factor. I reserve some doubt about its being true because it does not seem that the studies I found (and they are all I could find) controlled for ethnic mix and fat distribution has a strong genetic predisposition as well. But the possibility that it is true is of significant concern and my personal impression is the same as Backcountry Medic’s.