Despite reports in recent years suggesting childhood obesity could be reaching a plateau in some groups, the big picture on obesity rates for children ages 2 to 19 remains unfavorable.
Three decades of rising childhood obesity continued their upward trend in 2016 according to a new analysis from Duke Health researchers. The findings, which appear Feb. 26 in the journal Pediatrics, show 35.1 percent of children in the U.S. were overweight in 2016, a 4.7-percent increase compared to 2014.