From Your Health Journal…..”I do enjoy visiting the FOX News site often, as they have some quality, informative articles that pertain to health. I encourage visitors to Your Health Journal to visit FOX News for some great articles (link below). Today’s article review from FOX is about childhood obesity rates going down. This has been a hot topic over the years, and now, some positive news. As the article states, the number of low-income preschoolers who are obese has dropped, although modest, a positive sign. They can attribute this positive change to healthy food now available to some lower income families, which is a great thing, and long overdue. These families are also being taught the value of physical activity. As most of us know, obesity in general has been on the rise over the years, contributing to heart disease and type 2 diabetes. So, although a modest improvement, a very positive sign. Please visit the FOX site to read the complete article.”
From the article…..
The number of low-income preschoolers who qualify as obese or “extremely obese” has dropped over the last decade, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.
Although the decline was only “modest” and may not apply to all children, researchers said it was still encouraging.
“It’s extremely important to make sure we’re monitoring obesity in this low-income group,” said the CDC’s Heidi Blanck, who worked on the study.
Those kids are known to be at higher risk of obesity than their well-off peers, in part because access to healthy food is often limited in poorer neighborhoods.
The new results can’t prove what’s behind the progress, Blanck told Reuters Health – but two possible contributors are higher rates of breastfeeding and rising awareness of the importance of physical activity even for very young kids.
Blanck and her colleagues used data on routine clinic visits for about half of all U.S. kids eligible for federal nutrition programs – including 27.5 million children between age two and four.
They found 13 percent of those preschoolers were obese in 1998. That grew to just above 15 percent in 2003, but dropped slightly below 15 percent in 2010, the most recent study year included.
Similarly, the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from nearly 1.8 percent in 1998 to 2.2 percent in 2003, then dropped back to just below 2.1 percent in 2010, the research team reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Whether kids are obese is determined by their body mass index (BMI) – a measure of weight in relation to height – and by their age and sex.
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