Childhood Obesity Calculators

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From Your Health Journal…..”We know that childhood obesity is a real concern all over the world, as so many children are overweight or obese. Many children already suffer from risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, physical inactivity, obesity, high triglycerides, or high insulin. The possibility of predicting childhood obesity may help many children lead healthier lifestyles…..”

From the article…..

Researchers say they can predict a newborn baby’s odds of becoming an obese child using a simple new calculation.

The new formula factors in six easily-available pieces of information: a child’s birth weight, body mass index measurements of its parents, the number of people in the household, what type of occupation the mother has and whether or not she smoked while pregnant.

“This test takes very little time, it doesn’t require any lab tests and it doesn’t cost anything,” study author Dr. Philippe Froguel, a professor from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, said in a press release.

In a new study, the researchers derived the formula using data from a study that tracked 4,000 children born in Finland since 1986. At first the researchers were trying to develop a more complex formula looked for mutations in the children’s genetic profiles, but they failed to make accurate predictions.

However, once they used data that was readily available at the child’s birth to create the formula, the researchers found the 20 percent of children predicted to have the highest risk of obesity at birth made up about 80 percent of the obese children in the study pool.

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