Child Obesity

There is something uniquely worrisome ... in ... the cavalcade of new evidence about obese and overweight children."

Child obesity is increasing dramatically around the world, maintains Mary Eberstadt in the following viewpoint. She argues that while adult obesity can be seen simply as a result of free choice, children's obesity cannot. In her opinion, rising childhood obesity is due to a lack of parental care, particularly from mothers who often work outside the home and no longer monitor their children's eating habits as closely as they once did. Obese children suffer from a large number of physical and mental health problems, Eberstadt contends. Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center devoted to advanced study of politics, economics, and international affairs.

As you read, consider the following questions:

What do Canadian statistics show about the number of overweight children in Canada, as cited by Eberstadt?

What extra medical problems do overweight children suffer from, according to the author?

As explained by Eberstadt, why is heredity not a sufficient explanation for the increase in child obesity?

Just three months ago [in late 2002] a major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] confirmed what any American with eyes even half-open could already have reportedÐ'--that not only our adults, but also our children, are fat and getting fatter all the time. As the Department of Health and Human Services put it in a summary of this latest study's evidence, "Among children and teens ages 6 to 19, 15 percent (almost 9 million) are overweight according to the 1999-2000 data, or triple what the proportion was in 1980."

The widespread media attention given to this bad-news story would appear to be justified, for the JAMA study followed at least two other blue-chip examinations during the past year or so of the underage fat explosion. One of these, a report on the whopping economic costs of child and adolescent obesity, was published in Pediatrics magazine by researchers for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The other publication was a less prominent but also intriguing report in the May [2002] issue of the Journal of Nutrition written by researchers at the University of North Carolina [UNC]. This one emphasized one of the lesser-known aspects of the fat problemÐ'--that "adolescent obesity increases significantly among second- and third-generation immigrants to the United States," in the words of a UNC press release.

A Worldwide Problem

This is not to say that underage corpulence is unique to Americans and their offspringÐ'--far from it. Misconceptions and undeserved reputations to the contrary, most other advanced countries (and for that matter, a number of not-so-advanced ones) do indeed share in the child-fat-and-obesity problem, for the most part differing from us in degree rather than kind. In England, reported the Guardian earlier this year [2003], "Adult obesity rates have tripled and those in children have doubled since 1982." In Canada, says the Globe and Mail, also in 2002, "More than a third of Canadian children aged 2 to 11 are overweight, and half that number are obese, according to newly published Statistics Canada data." Moreover, "Canada now has more fat children than fat adults." As for Australia, a 2000 study there found that children of either sex were twice as likely to be defined as overweight in 2000 as in 1985.

Nor is the Anglo-speaking world the only one with a child-fat problem. Its svelte reputation quite aside, for example, continental Europe and its children are ballooning as well. In Italy, report researchers for the Bollettino Epidemiologico Nazionale, "Neapolitan children were more at risk of obesity than were children from France, Holland, the United States, and also than children living in Milan in northern Italy," while in the province of Benevento, "The prevalence of overweight and obesity was greater ... than in England, Scotland, and the United States." In Germany, according to researchers in the International Journal of Obesity, a "large study on all children entering school in Bavaria in 1997 shows patterns of overweight and obesity which are comparable with other European data" (though still "lower than US and Australian data"). Even vaunted France, if the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research is to be believed, admits an obesity problem among 10-year-olds of "epidemic proportions." "The number of seriously overweight children in France," reports the same institute, "has more than doubled since the 1980's."...

A Uniquely Worrisome Problem

If free-choosing adults were the only people implicated thus, we could perhaps rest philosophical here, content in the knowledge that the fat problemÐ'--... like smokingÐ'--will ultimately right or at least ameliorate itself in the long run. The problem, however, as the latest round of headlines demonstrates, is that the casualty count goes beyond those with free choice. For there is something uniquely worrisome, both as a public health issue and as a social fact, in one important subset of that problemÐ'--namely, the cavalcade of new evidence about obese and overweight children.

Child fat, though obviously related to adult fat in a variety of debated ways, is nevertheless a different order of problemÐ'--as experts already agree and the public is only beginning to recognize. The many American adults who might arguably be said to weigh more than they "ought" are one thing.... As one of many risky behaviors in which adults manifestly take pleasure, overeatingÐ'--like, say, drinking, smoking, drug-taking, and promiscuous sexÐ'--will have certain adverse consequences; these consequences will vary in seriousness according to how often and how long the risky behavior has been going on; and adults, though they may injure themselves by any and all of the above, are by common near-consensus qualified to make their own decisions about self-inflicted risks and injuries (subject to a certain measure of hectoring from others).

In fact, a compelling case can be made that of all the above-listed personal behaviors prone to abuse, adult fat is least injurious to the greater public goodÐ'--even given the issue of its medical costs, which are surely more than offset by the fantastically