More than 57 percent of children in the United States will be obese by age 35 if current trends in weight gain and poor eating habits continue, researchers warned Wednesday. The risk of obesity is high even among children whose present weight is normal, said the report in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Only those children with a current healthy weight have less than a 50 percent chance of
becoming obese by the age of 35 years,” said the study, led by researchers at Harvard University. Some 36.5 percent of the US adult population is now considered obese, a condition federal health officials define as having a body mass index of 30 or higher. The annual medical costs of obesity in the United States are more than $147 billion per year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. READ MORE
