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The trajectory of BMI increase in children and adolescents has decoupled from adults in many high-income countries, where childhood BMI trends have plateaued while adult BMI continues to rise.

In high-income countries, public health efforts for children may be showing results (plateauing BMI), but adult obesity continues to rise. This suggests that childhood interventions are working to some extent, but adult lifestyle factors remain unaddressed. Focus on maintaining childhood gains and addressing adult-specific barriers.

StrongQualifiesVERY_HIGH confidence
Trends in mean BMI have recently flattened in northwestern Europe and the high-income English-speaking and Asia-Pacific regions for both sexes... By contrast... adult mean BMI continues to increase in all of these regions and sexes
Leandra Abarca-Gómez et al. · The Lancet · 2017

Why this rating

Based on the same large pooled analysis with robust statistical modeling.

Source

Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and adults

Leandra Abarca-Gómez et al. · The Lancet · 2017

DOI 10.1016/s0140-6736(17)32129-3

Meta-analysis · 2416 studiesCited 7,601×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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