Overweight Brother and Sister Sitting on a Sofa Eating Takeaway Food and Watching the TV
By Roberto A. Ferdman from the Washing Post :
The kids are not all right. But they think they are.
A team of researchers at Georgia Southern University found an alarming rise in the lack of self awareness among children and teenagers in the United States. Specifically, way more overweight adolescents are oblivious today to the fact that they ought to lose weight than were in decades past—and it’s a big problem.
“The trend is very dangerous,” said Dr. Jian Zhang, who describes the phenomenon as a vicious cycle.
It’s also very complicated. Teenagers suffer through a lot of things, including an acute pressure of appearance. As a result, this is a worry that stems from health concerns, but requires a difficult balance in educating young people without causing or furthering anxiety about body image.
The researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an in-depth study of the nutritional status of adults and children in the United States, which tracked, among other things, the health of nearly 2,000 teenagers between the ages of 12 and 16 in the early 1990s and over 2,500 teenagers in the same age range between 2007 and 2012. As part of the study, participants’ body mass index—which is a fairly reliable measure of obesity among children, though less so among adults—was collected, along with the response to this rather straightforward question: “Do you consider yourself to be overweight, underweight, or just about the right weight?”
