Why Are American Teens Getting So Fat?

One in five US teenagers has unhealthy cholesterol levels, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The two stats that stick out from this study are: (1) 1/3 of teens are sufficiently overweight to qualify for cholesterol screening and (2) 14% of normal weight teens have unhealthy cholesterol levels.

This reminds me of a great piece Marc Ambinder wrote last year about what an American obesity policy should do:

And
with obesity, we’re dealing primarily with children and prevention.
Obese adults are not going to lose weight unless they decide to have
their stomachs separated from their digestive tracts. Megan is
pessimistic about any policy intervention and questions any such
intervention from a moral level. But any sensible policy is designed to
change the environment
for children, not for adults. It’s not as if children are making
choices about food and enjoyment in a vacuum. Childhood obesity is
fairly contagious: if you’ve got an obese friend, you are more likely
to be obese. The heritability quotient for obesity is .65, which means
that obese people tend to produce obese children; whether this is a
consequence of genetics, epigenetic factors, pre-natal nutrition —
it’s not clear. As kids and adults, obese people tend to cluster with
obese people.

There are compelling public
policy reasons to try and reduce the rate of childhood obesity.
Lectures and hectoring and moral suasion don’t work, but changing the
environment these kids grow up in might work. Even such a fairly minor
intervention as better maternal health habits can influence the
likelihood that a child will become obese. Breastfeeding babies reduces
the chances for obesity. Kids who sleep more as children will be less
obese as adults. Kids who aren’t as exposed to pesticides are less
likely to become obese.

Without
reversing the trendline, obese kids will continue to self-segregate;
stigma within their group will be reduced, which is good, but it will
grow among thin people, there will be more intergroup tension. John
Edwards’s two Americas: a fat America and a thin America, coming in
about 15 years to neighborhoods near you.