Obesity rates remain high, but stable in the U.S.

Only preschool-age children show signs of a turnaround, with their obesity rates nearly halved in the same period, according to a new federal study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The rapid increase in obesity we saw in the ’80s and ’90s has definitely slowed,” epidemiologist Cynthia Ogden told Reuters Health. “There’s some glimmer of hope in the new data in relation to the 2 to 5 year olds.” Ogden, a branch chief at the National Center for Health Statistics in Rockville, Maryland, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is lead author of the new study. Obesity rates among 2 to 5 year old Americans dropped from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent between 2003 and 2012, her team reports.