Four-year-old girls are six times more likely to have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 than they were 20 years ago and ten-year-olds are five times more likely, according to research published in the April issue of Acta Paediatrica.
Swedish researchers who studied BMI figures for more than a thousand children over two decades discovered that obesity levels had risen significantly among younger children, but that levels were much more constant among teenagers included in the research.
They also found that young girls were much more likely to be overweight or obese than boys.
For example, in 2002 the average ten-year-old girl was 2.1 per cent taller and 13.4 per cent heavier than her 1982 counterpart, with a 13.3 per cent increase in BMI. Boys were, on average, 1.1 per cent taller and 7.6 per cent heavier, with a 5.1 per cent increase in BMI.
540 children were studied in 1982 and a further 540 in 2002 – with equal numbers of girls and boys from each of the three age groups – four, ten and 16 - included in both samples. The data was drawn from official child health and school health records, as parents have a tendency to under-report the weight of obese children and are less likely to take part in studies.
“Despite high levels of parental education in the studied population, a factor that has been linked to lower childhood obesity levels, young children, especially girls, have become much more overweight or obese in the last 20 years” say lead researchers Drs Ulf Holmback and Anders Forslund from Uppsala University, Sweden.
“The large increase of obesity in four-year-olds and the lack of major change in 16-year-olds points to a recent change in the children’s environment and lifestyles. We should point out, however, that the weight data was missing from a greater percentage of the 16 year-olds’ records in 2002 and this could be because some of the more overweight teenagers refused to be weighed.”
Key findings included: