查看文章

OBJECTIVE. Our goal was to quantify the magnitude of energy imbalance responsible for the increase in body weight among US children during the periods 1988–1994 and 1999–2002.

METHODS. We adopted a counterfactual approach to estimate weight gains in excess of normal growth and the implicit “energy gap”—the daily imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. On the basis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention growth charts, we constructed weight, height, and BMI percentile distributions for cohorts 2 to 4 and 5 to 7 years of age in the 1988–1994 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (N = 5000). Under the counterfactual “normal-growth-only” scenario, we assumed that these percentile distributions remained the same as the cohort aged 10 years. Under this assumption, we projected the weight and height distributions for this cohort at 12 to 14 and 15 to 17 years of age …