The link between TV and obesity . But his astonishment had less to do with the City of Lights than with the city's light meals. Despite years of warnings that plump children grow into sicker adults, today 1 in every 5 U.S. children is overweight. That's double the rate of two decades ago. And family-oriented weight control programs have shown real success in keeping the pounds down.
Children grow unevenly so weight problems can be hard to spot.
But if 85 percent of a child's peers are thinner than he is, it's a warning sign, as is weight carried in the middle of the body and a family history of obesity. All three mean that it's time to take action. Laurel Mellin of the University of California-San Francisco, who developed a program called Shapedown, says parents need to nurture emotional resilience in kids, so they don't turn to food to make bad feelings go away. Calif. She says she felt unhappy and isolated before the program. On this day, however, she was rushing off to meet friends at her high school's football game.