Britain’s population is becoming overweight younger than ever before, researchers warn today.
Professor Rebecca Hardy and colleagues at University College London, UK, looked at age-related trends in the development of overweight or obesity using long-term figures from UK birth cohort studies.
They examined changes over the past nearly 70 years in body mass index (BMI) among more than 56,000 people born in the UK from 1946 to 2001.
This showed that children born since the 1980s are two to three times more likely than older generations to be overweight or obese by age ten. Most of the rise in BMI is due to increases at the upper end of the BMI range.
Nevertheless, the authors write in the journal PLoS Medicine that, while childhood obesity is more prevalent now, the majority of today’s children are still a normal weight.
The authors write: "Our results demonstrate how younger generations are likely to accumulate greater exposure to overweight or obesity throughout their lives and, thus, increased risk for chronic health conditions such as coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus. In the absence of effective intervention, overweight and obesity will have severe public health consequences in decades to come."
They hope these findings will be useful for policymakers and health care professionals, but they add that they may not be generalizable to other populations with "distinct genetic predispositions, environmental exposures and access to health care", though studies from a range of settings have indicated similar changes.
Johnson, W. et al. How Has the Age-Related Process of Overweight or Obesity Development Changed over Time? Co-ordinated Analyses of Individual Participant Data from Five United Kingdom Birth Cohorts. PLoS Medicine 19 May 2015; doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001828 [abstract]
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