Doubts About Preschool Obesity "Drop" on the Rise

Experts are weighting in about last month's report from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that claim that obesity rates among preschoolers have dropped by over 40 percent. Critics of the report are claiming that the data poorly represents Unites States children, as the sample size for the study was too small, and the data could have been too easily skewed.

Experts talking to Reuters on Sunday have explained that The CDC report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in late February was a poor assessment of the prevalence of obesity in America.

Epidemiologist Geoffry Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City explained that a sample size of only 871 children  from 19 states could not possibly hope to represent the wide variety of thousands-upon-thousands of children across the nation. Kabat said that the smaller the sample group compared to the true demographic, the greater the chance that that sample group could be heavily influenced by "chance fluctuations." In other words, an unlucky number of children selected for the sample group in the February CDC study could have simply been unusually healthy, skewing the data.

The data in question claimed that between 2003 and 2012, obesity rates among preschoolers two to five years old dropped from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent -- a nearly 43 percent drop in obesity rates. Officials at the time attributed this drop to changes in the Women Infants and Children regulation policy made by the CDC and White House officials back in 2009, which limited added sugar and saturated fat exposure among low-income preschoolers.

However, a federal Woman's Infants and Children (WIC) program study that looked at more than 200,000 children between 2003 and 2011 found very opposing data in California, with obesity rising from 17 to 20 percent. Even in New York, while the WIC study did indeed find a drop in child obesity, it was nothing close to 43 percent.

Shannon Whaley, a co-author of the WIC study told Reuters that she did believe that there has been a drop in obesity among all preschoolers in the U.S., but a dip far less dramatic than the drops the CDC reported.

Critics of the CDC February report are also quick to point out that while the CDC report appeared to focus on positive changes among preschoolers, the overall conclusion of the report maintained that obesity rates have changed very little in the U.S. in the past several years. This of course raised the question that if state and federal efforts to lower obesity among adolescents and adults barely helped, why would they have possibly had such a huge impact on children?

A in-depth critique of the CDC February report can be read at Reuters.

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