News went out last month that the rate of obesity among American preschoolers dropped by 43 percent within a decade but obesity specialists are skeptical and said the number appears too good to be true.
The latest data on obesity from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was published in the February 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association and based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), show that there is a significant drop in the prevalence of obesity among 2- to 5-year old children from almost 14 percent in 2003-2004 to just more than 8 percent in 2011-2012.
While First Lady Michelle Obama, who has been focusing on solving the obesity epidemic, viewed the report as a manifestation that the Let's Move campaign, the program she developed to promote healthy eating and physical activities among kids to curb childhood obesity, was working well, experts who inspected the data have questioned the 43 percent claim and said the report may be wrong.
"You need to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the validity of this finding," said Lee Kaplan, director of the weight center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, pointing out that there are few anti-obesity efforts targeted to preschoolers making the big drop in obesity among them highly unlikely. "The programs that have been implemented, from changing what's in vending machines to the Let's Move program, target school-age children more than preschoolers."
The CDC report is even in contrast with another study of preschoolers in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program which found no change in younger kids' obesity rates. The researchers even found that in children aged 3 and 4-years old in the WIC program in Los Angeles County, California, obesity increased from about 17 percent in 2003 to 20.4 percent in 2011.
The WIC study in New York may have found a decline in obesity rates from 19.5 percent in 2003 to 15.5 percent in 2011 but the drop is not as dramatic as the 43 percent decline claimed by the CDC.
"We agree there is a slight downward trend in obesity among 2- to 5-year olds," said Shannon Whaley, a co-researcher of the WIC study. "But a 43 percent drop is absolutely not what we're seeing."
Whaley also noted that their study involved over 200,000 children while the CDC report only looked at a small population of preschoolers.
