FLORENCE, Ala. — A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that among children between ages 5 and 14, nearly 12 percent developed obesity — 10 percent of girls and nearly 14 percent of boys.
The study finds that much of a child's "weight fate" is set by age 5, and that nearly half of kids who became obese by the eighth grade were overweight when they started kindergarten.
Nearly half of kids who started kindergarten overweight became obese teens. Overweight 5-year-olds were four times as likely as normal-weight children to become obese (32 percent versus 8 percent).
The study tracked a nationwide sample of more than 7,700 children through grade school.