A new analysis of federal data provides a dismal picture of children's cardiovascular health that suggests the current generation of teenagers could be at risk of increased heart disease.
The study, which examined children between 12 and 19 years old in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that the adolescents performed poorly overall on a set of seven criteria set by the American Heart Association for ideal cardiovascular health.
Diet in particular was a problem, with not one of the 5,450 children randomly selected for the survey from the U.S. population meeting the standards for diet. Taking out the diet measure, still just 16.4% of boys and 11.3% of girls were rated ideal on all of the other six criteria, which included smoking, exercise, weight, cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar.
-From today's WSJ and an article on page A3 entitled "Kids' Heart Health Is Faulted:
Analysis of Federal Data Finds Shortcomings in Diet, Exercise, Cholesterol Levels."
After Carol read the article, she had the following comments:
This goes along exactly with what they said at our Engine 2 Immersion weekend. They said virtually the entire US population – including children – now show signs of heart disease. (They figure this out by doing autopsies of children and young adults who die in accidents or by some kind of trauma.) During WWII when they autopsied young men killed in the war there was a good percentage whose arteries were not diseased, but by the time of the Viet Nam war all the young men were showing signs of heart disease. And now, they said, even children were showing those signs.
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