Oh, to be a child in America: Morning cartoons with a breakfast of sugar-coated cereal, hours on the sofa munching chips and playing video games, matinee movies enjoyed with mega-sized servings of soda and popcorn, frozen dinners followed by more hours surfing computer chat rooms, and finally bed. In all, this combination of inactivity and gluttonous feeding, which is shared by millions of American children, fuels one of the country's most alarming pediatric problems: obesity.
According to America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2003, issued in July 2003 by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, the number of overweight and obese children in the United States has more than doubled in the last two decades.
Overweight and obesity are defined, respectively, as being in the 85th and 95th percentiles for body mass index (BMI--the ratio of weight in kilograms to height in meters squared) for age and sex based on nationally representative survey data. Today, 15% of all children aged 6-18 exceed the upper range of healthy weights for their age groups. Among black and Hispanic children, the number leaps to an average of 26%.
Obesity can be a dangerous childhood hazard. According to Stephen Daniels, a professor of pediatrics and environmental health at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, many overweight and obese children suffer a range of debilitating health problems such as type 2 diabetes mellitus (which has increased more than 10-fold in children since 1982), sleep apnea, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, in addition to low self-esteem and depression. Data published in the August 2003 issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Center for Child Health Research further indicate that nearly 1 million obese U.S. children suffer from a condition called metabolic syndrome. This syndrome, which makes children unusually prone to type 2 diabetes and premature heart disease, is characterized by the presence of at least five criteria: excessive abdominal fat, high blood pressure, high triglyceride levels in blood, low levels of "good" HDL cholesterol, and high blood sugar.
