The Child-Fat Problem by Mary Eberstadt - Literature review Example

Just three months ago, a major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed what any American with eyes even half-open could already have reported--that not only our adults but also our children, are fat and getting fatter all the time. As the Department of Health and Human Services put it in a summary of this latest study's evidence, "Among children and teens ages 6 to 19, 15 percent (almost 9 million) are overweight according to the 1999-2000 data, or triple what the proportion was in 1980.

" The widespread media attention given to this bad-news story would appear to be justified, for the JAMA study followed at least two other blue-chip examinations during the past year or so of the underage fat explosion. One of these, a report on the whopping economic costs of child and adolescent obesity, was published in Pediatrics magazine by researchers for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The other publication was a less prominent but also intriguing report in the May issue of the Journal of Nutrition written by researchers at the University of North Carolina.

This one emphasized one of the lesser-known aspects of the fat problem--that "adolescent obesity increases significantly among second-and third-generation immigrants to the United States," in the words of a UNG press release. This is not to say that underage corpulence is unique to Americans and their offspring--far from it. Misconceptions and undeserved reputations to the contrary most other advanced countries (and for that matter, a number of not-so-advanced ones) do indeed share in the child-fat-and-obesity problem, for the most part differing from us in degree rather than kind.

In England, reported the Guardian earlier this year, "Adult obesity rates have tripled and those in children have doubled since 1982." In Canada, says the Globe and Mail, also in 2002, "More than a third of Canadian children aged 2 to 11 are overweight, and half that number are obese, according to newly published Statistics Canada data."