Evidence that the prevalence of childhood overweight is plateauing: data from nine countries.

By T. Olds, C. Maher, S. Zumin, S. Péneau, S. Lioret, K. Castetbon, Bellisle, J. D. de Wilde, M. Hohepa, Ralph Maddison and 7 more. International Journal of Pediatric Obesity, 2011

632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Until quite recently, there has been a widespread belief in the popular media and scientific literature that the prevalence of childhood obesity is rapidly increasing. However, high quality evidence has emerged from several countries suggesting that the rise in the prevalence has slowed appreciably, or even plateaued. This review brings together such data from nine countries (Australia, China, England, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and USA), with data from 467,294 children aged 2-19 years. The mean unweighted rate of change in prevalence of overweight and obesity was +0.00 (0.49)% per year across all age ×sex groups and all countries between 1995 and 2008. For overweight alone, the figure was +0.01 (0.56)%, and for obesity alone -0.01 (0.24)%. Rates of change differed by sex, age, socioeconomic status and ethnicity. While the prevalence of overweight and obesity appears to be stabilizing at different levels in different countries, it remains high, and a significant public health issue. Possible reasons for the apparent flattening are hypothesised.

Subfields: Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Pharmacy, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56f983c68e3df562aff4d213d04a4b948e96eb04

Citations in the corpus

• Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and adults (2017, neutral): “33 Finally, although the age-dependent cutoffs for defining overweight and obesity in children and adolescents reflect natural growth in these ages, they are based on BMI distributions in a reference population, and not explicitly selected to represent optimal BMI levels for health in prospective…”
• Prevalence of Childhood and Adult Obesity in the United States, 2011–2012 (2014, neutral): “32 For example, in Germany a study of children aged 4 to 16 years found a significant decline in overweight or obesity between 2004 and 2008 among the youngest children (aged 4–7 years) and a stabilization in other ages.”