How much should teens weigh to prevent heart disease as adults?

Follow me at @drClaire We’ve long known that being overweight can lead to cardiovascular disease and early death. We also know that being overweight as a teen makes it more likely that someone will be overweight as an adult, which is why we pediatricians talk so much to teens and their parents about getting to — and staying at — a healthy weight. But we may have set the bar too low. A study just published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) says that if we really want to prevent heart disease in adulthood, our teens should be much thinner than we currently tell them to be. The number doctors use to figure out if someone’s weight is healthy is the body mass index, or BMI. The BMI is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in meters, and it is a very useful number when it comes to describing how much weight a person is carrying on their body frame. It’s kind of a thinness/fatness index, if you will. For adults, we say that the BMI should be between 18.5 and 24.9 (25 is the cutoff for overweight). For youth 2-20 years old, we use BMI percentiles: we say that a BMI percentile between 5 and 85 is fine, between 85 and 95 is overweight, and 95 or greater is obese. In Israel, 17-year-olds have a medical exam as a screening for military service. As part of this medical exam, they get a height and weight measurement. For the NEJM study, researchers looked at the height and weight data for 2.3 million Israeli adolescents (mostly boys) t...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Children's Health Parenting Prevention Source Type: news