When Do Kids Become Obese?
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iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — The percentage of obese children in the U.S. has been described in the past, but new research to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests a possible answer as to when exactly kids are most likely to become obese during their childhood.
Researchers followed more than 7,700 children over nine years from kindergarten to 8th grade and found that upon entering kindergarten, 14.9 percent of kids were overweight and 12.4 percent were obese. Fast-forward 9 years later, and the study shows a higher percentage — 20.8 percent — of the kids studied were obese in the 8th grade.
Interestingly, among the 14.9 percent of kids who had entered kindergarten as overweight, nearly a third — 31.8 percent — became newly obese over the next nine years and 19.7 percent of them had done so during the very first year in kindergarten.
Though researchers did not note a difference across race or ethnic groups, their results suggest that overweight kids of higher socioeconomic background possessed a greater, five-fold risk of becoming obese over the course of the study, as compared to a 3.4-fold risk in kids within the lowest socioeconomic group.
By understanding how overweight kids are more prone to becoming obese even before entering elementary school, researchers feel greater efforts can be made toward finding ways to modify environmental factors contributing to childhood obesity at an earlier age or even during pregnancy.
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