Childhood Obesity Rates Stop Rising

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Obesity Levels Among Childrens and Teens Stabilize

A new study on childhood obesity over the past eight years shows positive signs.

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Moreover, when the researchers compared the two periods with surveys dating back to 1999, they found no significant increase over the entire period, strengthening their confidence that the trend had leveled off.

"After two time points it looked pretty much the same, but you need more time points to determine a trend, so it's hard to be sure. But after multiple time points that look flat, you may be cautiously optimistic that it is leveling off," Ogden said.

The trends held steady for males and females and across all racial and ethnic groups, though older children, along with blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, continued to have higher obesity rates.

"I don't want to minimize the problem," Ogden said. "It hasn't gone away. But this may be a first necessary step; it perhaps is starting to go down."

Experts offered a variety of possible explanations for the shift.

"I don't think we can pinpoint to any one thing that is responsible for the plateau, but I think it could be a gathering of a variety of strategies," Dietz said.

Barry M. Popkin, who heads the Interdisciplinary Obesity Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he is skeptical that government programs are responsible. One possible influence, he said, is the flagging economy.

"When economic times are difficult, we always slow things down on lots of things, like eating," Popkin said.

Another possibility is that there is a limit to how many children are genetically predisposed to becoming obese, and they have already become so.

"It may be that we've reached a point where the proportion of the population genetically susceptible to obesity is already obese," said Susan Yanovski, co-director of the office of obesity research at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Some researchers, however, are skeptical that the epidemic has peaked.

"The government definitely wants us to believe we're making progress in the obesity epidemic. We on the ground feel that's ridiculous," said Robert H. Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco. "We who are taking care of patients are seeing bigger and bigger problems."

Not only are doctors continuing to see more overweight children, but the proportion who are severely overweight appears to be increasing, several experts said.

"More and more children are overweight, and those coming in are much heavier than they were," said Melinda S. Sothern of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans.