Regionally, north Africa, the Middle East and Latin America all have overweight and obese rates on a par with Europe.
In a study of more than 10,000 children across the U.S., sociologist Rachel Kimbro and her colleagues at Rice found that children living in a traditional two-parent married household are less likely to be obese (17percentt obesity rate) than children living with cohabitating parents, who have a 31percentt obesity rate.
City statistics released last month showed that nearly 40 percent of public-school children in kindergarten through eighth grade were overweight or obese, and that obesity rates were substantially higher in poor neighborhoods.
Black and Hispanic youths have the lowest rates of participation in physical activity, both inside and outside the school, contributing to a disparity in obesity: while 24percentt of white adolescents are obese, the rate is 31percentt for blacks and 30percentt for Hispanics.
While about 16percentt of whites who earn about $50,000 a year are obese, that rate climbs to nearly 23percentt among those whites who earn about $15,000.
Recent studies have found that 65-67 percent of women's diets are made up of carbohydrates, and more than half of all women in Morocco are categorized as overweight or obese, a rate that has tripled in the last 20 years.
Mean total costs were 72% higher among children born to obese mothers (rate ratio (RR) 1.72, 95% CI 1.71 to 1.73) compared with infants born to healthy weight mothers.
1Recently Burkhauser and Cawley (2008) compared multiple measures of fatness and found that many important patterns, such as who is classified as obese, group rates of obesity, and correlations of obesity with social science outcomes, are all sensitive to the measure of fatness and obesity used (see also Johansson et al. 2009;Wada and Tekin 2010 Parks et al. 2011).
Interestingly, opposite trends were found regarding self-rated health: in Portugal, the percentage of obese subjects rating their health as "bad" or "very bad" decreased, while the opposite trend was found in Switzerland (Table 2).
About one-third of America's children are overweight or obese, but rates are highest among poor and minority children.
On the intensity scale, obese children rated all flavor concentrations lower than did those in the normal-weight group.
