Obese Kids Increasingly Have Adult Diseases

With childhood obesity on the rise, more and more kids are at high risk for obesity-related conditions like cirrhosis, diabetes, and heart disease. Time magazine’s Alice Park explained how obese kids are becoming biological adults long before their normal weight peers. "If you take some of the tissues from these overweight kids and compare them to their parents’…and even their grandparents’, they might be pretty indistinguishable. If you did not have that age, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell who they belonged to."

As doctors try to reach families before kids develop these health problems, Park says, "What we’re really beginning to understand here is that a lot of this really takes a community. You know, it takes not just a family trying to eat right, but it takes a food industry providing good options."

Park's article, “Young Kids, Old Bodies,” appears in the March 3 issue of Time.