Childhood Obesity Is Just Getting Worse, and This New Study May Offer Some Clues

Public health efforts have “largely failed.”

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In 2014, it looked like the United States was finally making some progress in reducing childhood obesity—after years of steady increase, the rates had finally begun to decline. But a pair of new studies suggests the good news was short-lived: Over the past four years, childhood obesity rates have in fact held steady. And despite well-funded and highly publicized national campaigns to combat obesity, childhood obesity has actually increased in certain groups. As scientists scratch their heads trying to figure out what’s going on—another new study may hold some clues.

The initial study, published in the journal Pediatrics, analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2016. Childhood overweight rates increased from 29 percent to 35 percent during that time period, the researchers reported. And from 2014 to 2016, severe obesity among children two to five years old increased from 9 percent to 14 percent.

An accompanying study examining the same data found that Hispanic preschoolers were twice as likely as their Caucasian counterparts to be obese, and African American preschoolers were 70 percent more likely. Preschoolers from low-income families had twice the obesity rate of their peers from average-income families.

Obesity is a thorny problem because it involves so many factors. Diet and exercise may sound like easy things to change, but not if you’re poor, says Asheley Cockrell Skinner, a public health epidemiologist at Duke University and lead author on the study. “Living in a safe neighborhood where you can be active, with sidewalks where you can ride bikes—not having those things are all playing a role in obesity.”

Which is why, when the childhood obesity epidemic began to make headlines a decade or so ago, public health experts launched major campaigns to fight it. Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move brought exercise programs to underserved schools. The US Department of Agriculture passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which made school meals and snacks healthier. Some cities even placed a tax on sugary drinks. “All of these changes were apparently not enough,” Skinner says. “Our public health approach to the epidemic has largely failed so far,” notes a commentary (PDF) accompanying the Pediatrics studies.

That nothing seems to work has some scientists wondering whether the interventions are coming too late. Some scientists now believe that by the time children are old enough to exercise and eat solid food, their lifelong patterns of weight gain have already been established. In another study published in February, researchers in Alberta, Canada, presented new evidence showing how circumstances at birth might affect a child’s risk for childhood obesity.

The study, published in a different journal called JAMA Pediatrics, looked at 935 mother-infant pairs over the course of three years. The children born to overweight mothers were three times as likely to be overweight or obese as those born to mothers of normal weight. That wasn’t surprising—genetic predisposition could explain it, and so could diet and lifestyle. But here’s the weird thing: The children of overweight moms born via cesarean section were five times as likely to be overweight or obese as those born vaginally. This echoes previous research on connections between cesarean sections and obesity. (In the United States, roughly 1 in 3 births are completed via C-section—a 60 percent increase since 1996.) 

The study’s authors also found that the feces of infants born to overweight mothers contained more  Lachnospiraceae bacteria than the feces of babies from normal-weight mothers. Interestingly, babies born via cesarean section had a different type of Lachnospiraceae bacteria from those born vaginally.

The working theory, explains lead author Hein Min Tun, a researcher in epidemiology and pediatric medicine at the University of Alberta, is that infants pick up their mothers’ community of bacteria in the birth canal. Infants born via cesarean section pick up some bacteria as well, but it’s a slightly different community—perhaps a mix that is more likely to promote obesity. “Weight is influenced by so many factors,” Tun says. “But people go to the gym every day and it doesn’t do anything. They can’t reduce the weight. That’s one clue that there might be something else going on.”

The study had some limitations: For starters, it didn’t test mothers for the presence of Lachnospiraceae—only the babies. And it didn’t consider other factors that might affect a baby’s bacterial mix, such as breastfeeding and antibiotics. Still, Tun says, it’s a promising line of inquiry.

Duke’s Skinner agrees. Her colleagues are also looking into the role of the transfer of microbes at birth on weight gain patterns, she told me. “I think we’re going to learn that microbiome plays a huge role in obesity.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate