The number of overweight children is on the rise worldwide and will climb dramatically by 2010, according to a new study by Youfa Wang, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s department of international health and its Center for Human Nutrition.
The study was conducted by Wang and Tim Lobstein, child and adolescent health research coordinator at the International Task on Obesity, who based their research on all available international studies of overweight and obese young people up to age 18 between 1980 and 2005.
The data came from 60 countries, and is of particular concern because overweight and obese children are at risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases.
The number of overweight and obese children has increased in almost every country studied, and has risen most noticeably in wealthier nations.
Only in Russia and Poland, nations that experienced marked economic problems after the fall of communism, did the numbers of overweight and obese children decline.
Elsewhere, they were on the rise. By 2010, the study predicted that 46 percent of the children of North and South America will be overweight, and 15 percent of them obese.
