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.