More U.S. children suffer from extreme obesity

More and more American children are suffering from extreme obesity, posing danger to their future lives, according to a new study released on Thursday.

"Children who are extremely obese may continue to be extremely obese as adults, and all the health problems associated with obesity are in these children's futures," said Corinna Koebnick, a research scientist at the Los Angeles-based Kaiser Permanente, a medical institution, and lead author of the study.

"Without major lifestyle changes, these kids face a 10 to 20 years shorter life span and will develop health problems in their twenties that we typically see in 40 to 60 year olds," Koebnick said.

Base on analysis of 710,949 children and teens ages 2-19, the study is the first to look at children's obesity using the recent 2009 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extreme obesity definition, according to Koebnick.

The CDC defines extreme obesity as having a body mass index 1.2 times the 95th percentile of the body mass index.

Previous research was based on clinical definitions of obesity, but did not look for extreme obesity, said Koebnick.

By the new definition, 7.3 percent of boys and 5.5 percent of girls were extremely obese, according to the study.

The results were worse for minority children, with 12 percent of black teenage girls and 11.2 percent of Latino teenage boys judged extremely obese, according to the study.

Source: Xinhua