by Art Young

Created on: February 12, 2010

For several years, medical experts have predicted that childhood obesity would cause the current generation of children to live shorter lives than those of their parents. Up until recently, this prediction of premature death had been based on anecdotal evidence rather than verifiable research. This speculation became “fact” with the publication of an article in the February 2010 issue of the “New England Journal of Medicine.”

The publication referenced a landmark study that tracked thousands of children through adulthood. It found that obese children with a condition known as “pre-diabetes” were more than twice as likely as the thinnest to die before age 55 of illness or self-inflected injury.

The study analyzed data collected from 4,857 non-diabetic Indians born between 1945 and 1984. The data were collected when the youngsters were (on average) 11 years old and it assessed the extent to which body mass index (BMI), glucose tolerance, blood pressure and total cholesterol levels predicted premature death.

An Indian Community Was an Excellent Research Lab

This research was conducted among the Pima and Tohono O’odham Indians which live in the Gila River Indian community in Arizona. While American Indians are not representative of the nation’s population as a whole, they represent a unique test case because researchers determined that their rate of obesity and Type 2 diabetes began to dramatically rise about two decades before weight problems became widespread among the general population of other Americans. As such, this population presents a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of what might be the future.

The study began in 1945 and by 2003, 559 participants had died, including 166 who died of causes other than accidents and homicide. This would include cardiovascular disease, cancer, infections, diabetes, drug overdose, alcohol poisoning and liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse. The researchers noted that the (relatively) large number of alcohol-related liver disease deaths could have been the result of diabetes.

Adults in this community who had the highest body mass index scores as children were 2.3 times as likely to have died early as those with the lowest BMI scores. Those with the highest glucose levels were 73% as likely to have died prematurely 

BMI and Obesity

Public health experts estimate that one in three American children is now considered to be either overweight or obese. On its

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