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Prevalence and trends in overweight and obesity in three cross sectional studies of British children, 1974-94

BMJ 2001; 322 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.322.7277.24 (Published 06 January 2001) Cite this as: BMJ 2001;322:24

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Obese children are also overweight

EDITOR-We thank Professor Cole for his rapid response to our paper
and for giving us the opportunity to remove an ambiguity.

We apologise for the lack of clarity in our paper and confirm that we
did indeed use the first definition of overweight, i.e. a BMI exceeding
the overweight cut-off, in accordance with the intention of the
International Obesity Task Force [1]. Hence an 'obese' child is also
'overweight', and the trends in our paper in prevalence of overweight also
include those of obesity.

As much of the media coverage reported a greater prevalence of
overweight in girls than in boys we also wish to point out that this is a
consequence of the definition being an average across data from seven
countries [1]. Had UK data alone been used the difference would have been
much less. However the trends in overweight are undoubtedly robust to
modifications of the cut-off points.

1. Cole TJ, Bellizzi MC, Flegal KM, Dietz WH. Establishing a standard
definition for child overweight and obesity worldwide: international
survey. BMJ 2000;320:1240-3.

Competing interests: No competing interests

15 January 2001
Susan Chinn
Reader in Medical Statistics and Professor of Public Health Medicine
Roberto J Rona
Department of Public HealthSciences, King's College, London