The weird, wild world of childhood obesity statistics. 18 November 2009 5:48 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,news,politics,school,society,weird,whoops , trackbackSo I knew I was going to have trouble with the reading for next week’s Food Sociology class when on the very first page I read the statement:
“We suffer from widespread obesity, particularly among children…”
Karl Weber, preface to Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer — And What You Can Do About It (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).
Oh, really? Last time I checked, I thought rates were way higher in adults than in kids…. oh, sure enough. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, “Results from the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 32.7 percent of U.S. adults 20 years and older are overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are extremely obese….” That’s with your standard BMI >24.9 kg/m2 for overweight, BMI > 30 kg/m2 for obese, and BMI > 40 kg/m2 for extremely obese, and it’s a grand total of 72.9 percent of the adult population weighing in (har, har) as overweight or obese. Compare that to the CDC on childhood overweight and obesity, which says, “The most recent NHANES data (2003–2006) showed that for children aged 6 –11 years and 12–19 years, the prevalence of overweight (BMI ≥85th percentile) was 33.3% and 34.1% respectively.”
Holy cats! Adulthood makes you fat!
Ok, but seriously. First of all, at first glance those kid numbers don’t look nearly as bad as the numbers for adults. But wait — how the hell can 33.3% or 34.1% of a population be at or above the 85th BMI percentile? What in the name of monkeys does that even mean? As far as I can tell (so far), childhood obesity is defined in terms of some magical past time when only 15% of the under-20 crowd was overweight or obese? I think? I’ve obviously got some more reading to do here. Like finding out what value of BMI is being used to define childhood obesity, and whether (and why) it’s different from the adult standard — which, I should point out, is based on a formula intended to quantitatively describe a population, not conveniently prescribe much of anything. True. In the meantime, I’m probably comparing apples and oranges, but unless childhood obesity numbers are defined in some extremely magical way that makes 33 or 34 percent bigger than 73, it’s just not more prevalent than the adult kind. Sorry.
And that’s the kind of trouble I’m running into on the very first page of this fricken book. I’m writing to take a break after the first chapter, in which Eric Schlosser tells an interviewer that obesity costs “us” (whoever we are) $100 billion annually, when as far as I can tell, even in the wake of a Surgeon General nigh-fanatical in his calls to action, the CDC’s economic analysis of choice won’t put annual medical costs due to obesity higher than $75 billion (the article in question, by the way, is Finkelstein, EA, Fiebelkorn, IC, Wang, G. State-level estimates of annual medical expenditures attributable to obesity. Obesity Research 2004;12(1):18–24. And I totally downloaded it for later reading, in case I had too much coffee this morning.)
Finally, whatever I find out about the definition of childhood obesity that’s causing such consternation, maybe we can all have warm fuzzies about the fact that rates of childhood obesity seem to be stabilizing in the U.S.? So maybe it’s time to figure out where the new 85th percentile is? (Yep, went there. You should see me trying to draw graphs about all this, you really should.)
Ok, I feel better after a little fact-checking (which Schlosser says was done extensively for Fast Food Nation, but I guess not on his numbers in this interview, sigh.) Back to the read.
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http://imprompt.us Peter Boothe
