Peasburgh

Peasburgh

Inspiration

If current U.S. trends continue, more than 57 percent of today’s youth will be obese at age 35, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The research also found that excess weight in childhood is predictive of adult obesity, even among young children, and that healthy-weight children are the only ones with less than a 50 percent chance of adult obesity. The findings were based on a rigorous simulation model that provides the most accurate predictions to date of obesity prevalence at various ages.

The study will be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Adult obesity is linked with increased risk of diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer,” said Zachary Ward, an analyst at Harvard Chan School’s Center for Health Decision Science and lead author of the study. “Our findings highlight the importance of prevention efforts for all children as they grow up, and of providing early interventions for children with obesity to minimize their risk of serious illness in the future.”

The researchers used new computational methods and a novel statistical approach to account for long-term population-level trends in weight gain. They pooled height and weight data from five longitudinal studies of 41,567 children and adults. Using these data, they created 1,000 virtual populations of 1 million youth up to age 19 who were representative of the 2016 U.S. population. They then projected height and weight trajectories from childhood to age 35.

What it does

Tries to prevent the onslaught of childhood obesity through educating the youth about better ways to prepare their own food and getting parents involved in the process of teaching basic skill sets that may ignite a desire to learn more about health and nutrition later.