Health Buzz: What Are The Odds Your Child Will Be Obese? | Your ...

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A New Calculator May Accurately Predict if Your Child is at Risk for Obesity

What if you could predict your newborn?s likelihood of becoming obese? That?s exactly what researchers now believe they can do, with a formula called the obesity risk calculator. Enter a few simple factors, including body mass indexes of both parents, number of household members, infant?s birth weight, mother?s occupation, and whether the mother smoked during pregnancy. Researchers settled on these indicators after following 4,000 children born in Finland, as part of a study that began in 1986. They accurately predicted childhood obesity up to 85 percent of the time, reports Fox News. The research was published Wednesday in PLOS ONE.

If the calculator reveals your child is likely at risk to be obese? Get an early start on building healthy habits, Marjo-Riitta Jarvelin, one of the study?s lead authors and a professor of lifecourse epidemiology at London?s Imperial College, told Fox News. If your child?s obesity risk is, for example, 70 percent, ?then we can say for sure that something should be done,? Jarvelin said. ?The prevention of obesity should be started as early as possible. If [a] child is obese at the age of 6 or 7, it?s difficult to make the child lose weight. You have to work really, really hard.?

More than one-third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese in 2008, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These overweight and obese young people face a greater risk of health problems like heart disease, bone and joint problems, low self-esteem, sleep apnea, and prediabetes, which often leads to type 2 diabetes.

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