Speaker: How is obesity and overweight defined in childhood and adolescence?

Dr. William McCarthy: We find obesity and overweight in childhood and adolescence pretty much as we do in adults, we use the BMI or body mass index. In adults, we just use the body mass index in relationship to height and weight.

In children, we add two other factors we add age and gender. And what we do? We do find obesity as a body mass index adjusted for age as above the 95 percentile and we do find overweight between the 85 and 95 percentile. And so, what we have for example, let's say an adult would have a BMI of 23 that adult would be considered perfectly normal weight.

However, if we have a young girl with a BMI of 23 perhaps 10 years old, she would be frankly obese. Now, we've never used the term obesity in reference to children till this past July. And we've started to realize that it's not about self esteem which tells back on using this term for many years, but we've -- it's become more important to really face the issue and to start calling it as it is.