Caption: Nearly one in three children in the US is overweight or obese, and, alarmingly, obese children are developing health problems that once afflicted only adults, such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Obese children also suffer from higher rates of depression, greater difficulty in peer relationships, and poorer quality of life than their normal-weight counterparts. Obesity can cause heart disease, hardening of the arteries, metabolic syndrome, high cholesterol, asthma, sleep disorders, liver disease, orthopedic complications, and mental health problems.
Some schools are implementing a body mass index (BMI) report card that is sent home to parents. BMI is a commonly used measure of a person's weight relative to height. It is calculated by dividing a student's height in meters by weight in kilograms squared. For adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a BMI of 25 or above as overweight and a BMI of 30 or above as obese. For example, a person with height 5'5'' is considered overweight if she weighs 150 pounds or more and obese if she weights 180 pounds or more.
As Patricia Anderson and Kristin Butcher note in the Future of Children, the conventional definitions for children and adolescents are somewhat different, because normal BMI values change throughout childhood. Instead, children's levels of adiposity, or fatness, are assessed by comparing their BMI values with those of a fixed reference group of U.S. children of the same age and sex. Children at or above the 85th percentile of the BMI distribution--meaning that at least 85 percent of children of the same age and sex in the reference group had lower values of BMI--are often defined as being overweight, and those at or above the 95th percentile of the distribution for the reference group are often defined to be obese.
