250 free market economy as well as in the media influence and nutritional changes, mainly a growing fast food availability [3, 12]. An increase in the occurrence of overweight and obesity in children since 2000 has been partly connected with subsequent changes that followed the accession of Poland to the European Union and the opening of borders. People in big cities such as Cracow have experienced a visible improvement in the standard of living and have become attracted to a more consumptive lifestyle which may lead to the growing prevalence of overweight and obesity. The paper of Jebb and Lambert [10] stressed that the data on overweight and obesity in children and adolescents are dominated by studies in Northern and Western Europe and that their values are closest to US data due to a similar economic level of those countries. At the same time, authors showed that in the available literature there are few reports from European countries with lower economic status. Our research presents data from Eastern Europe which complement the knowledge on the prevalence and trends of overweight and obesity in European children and adolescents. In the authors’ own research, overweight and obesity reach higher values in the group of boys. The earlier research performed on the population of Cracow confirms this observation although the differences were not as big as in 2009. In children from Warsaw, overweight was twice as frequent in boys as in girls [4]. In the Czech Republic, another East European country which has undergone the process of transformation in recent years, the situation is the same as in Poland [20]. In Hungary, obesity was more common in men but at the same time more women were diagnosed as overweight [2]. In countries such as China [21, 22] and Thailand [1], the incidence of overweight and obesity is more frequently observed in boys than in girls, whereas in the United Arab Emirates there are more girls diagnosed as overweight and obese [16]. In western countries with high economic status, the tendency is opposite [5, 11]. Conclusions The research performed and the analysis of the findings permit the conclusion that overweight and obesity occur in a remarkably high percentage of children in Cracow, particularly in younger age groups. Overweight and obesity are almost twice as frequent in boys as in girls. The differences related to place of residence are small and statistically insignificant excepting obesity which occurs twice as frequently in urban boy as in their rural peers (p = 0.05). A gradual increase in prevalence of overweight and obesity has been observed in Cracow since 1971. 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