White House Task Force on Obesity Report: Lies, Distortion, and Little Else

posted at 10:50 am on May 13, 2010 by Howard Portnoy
[ Healthcare ]   

“The childhood obesity epidemic in America is a national health crisis.” So begins the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity Report to the President. And so begins a campaign of distortion, conflation, and out-and-out misstatement that ultimately translates to more taxpayer dollars being flushed down the hopper in the vain pursuit of more government control over your life.

Is it a problem when kids overeat? Yes. Are there fat kids in this country? Yes again, though not nearly as many as the Task Force and its spokesperson Michelle Obama would have you believe. The statistic the Report offers comes in the second sentence: “One in every three children (31.7%) ages 2-19 is overweight or obese.”

That stat seems alarming until you notice the convenient use of the disjunction or to conflate two related but divergent statistics. Overweight and obesity are two different metrics along the same continuum. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has operational definitions for both: Overweight is defined as a body mass index (BMI) at or above the 85th percentile and lower than the 95th percentile. Obesity is defined as a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.

So why conflate them? Or better still, why not call the taxpayer-funded group the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity and Overweight? The answer is that obesity has a more serious and urgent ring to it, one that will incite a more visceral response among the intended audience. The reason the statistics are conflated is the same. The figures sound far scarier when they represent close to a third of the population.

So what are the real percentages of overweight and obese children? According to the most recent available data from the CDC, 18% of adolescents (children ages 12-19) are overweight. The percentages for children ages 6 to 11 and ages 2 to 5 are 15% and 11% respectively. If you take the average of the three percentages, you come up with a figure of 14.7% for of the entire childhood population of the U.S.

Turning to obesity, the CDC in a separate report notes that in 2008, 12.6% of white children, 11.8% of black children, and 18.5% of Hispanic children met the clinical definition for obesity. American Indian or Alaska Native children had the highest obesity levels, at 21.2%. Since the proportion of each of these groups to the entire population varies so radically, taking a mean of the percentages would give a stat this is skewed upward. Nevertheless, if you take mean, which is 16.03%, and add it to the 14.7% of the childhood population that is overweight, you end up with 30.7%. Yet, this figure is still a full percentage point lower than the one cited in the Task Force Report.

But there is another statistic in the CDC report worth considering:

One of 7 low-income, preschool-aged children is obese, but the obesity epidemic may be stabilizing. The prevalence of obesity in low-income two to four year-olds increased from 12.4 percent in 1998 to 14.5 percent in 2003 but rose to only 14.6 percent in 2008. [Emphasis added]

Interesting that the Obama administration should be starting its war on obese children at a time when the trend appears to be bottoming out. It would be even more interesting to know what this campaign is costing taxpayers.

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