An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that the rate at which obesity is increasing has slowed down and may actually have plateaued. Is this good news? It would be if obesity was descreasing for everyone, at both ends of the economic spectrum. But what if obesity is decreasing for those who can afford healthy food and still increasing for those who can’t?
Research presented at the recent International Congress on Obesity showed that childhood obesity has stabilized or decreased in many countries over the last ten years. Rates are up in China, Vietnam and Germany, but have decreased or stabilized in Australia, Denmark, England, France, Greece, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US. In India, rates have stabilized for boys, but are still rising for girls.
When you dig a little deeper into the numbers, however, there’s a difference between the children of the rich and the children of the poor. An English study, for example, found that obesity was decreasing for 5-to-10-year-olds from higher socioeconomic groups, but was still increasing in lower socioeconomic groups. When the two sets of data balance each other out, it creates the appearance of a plateau.
