The LA Times recently featured an alarming study that adds to our concerns on an impending health crises in America. No it is not about Aids , breast cancer , autism or any of the many other exotic new age illness that can bring Hollywood , or Wall street’s millionaires out in numbers to run around Central Park for yet another cause. Instead it has to deal with child obesity. The rates are very high and few seem to know the reason. The point of the matter is that as late as 2004, CDC research showed that obesity caused the death of some 400,000 a year in the United States.[1] This rivals the figures that exist for death by smoking and with the countries penchant for wars and nation building, might also compete with the civilian deaths by soldiers abroad in Third world countries as they struggle to spread democracy far and wide. Another study in 2005 found that at the present rate, the first generation of the modern era might just live shorter than their parents. That obviously is never a good sign.

          I am not this great fan of statistics since they are open to interpretation which often can be misleading depending on who does them and your intended target for the results. Nevertheless, one must be the messenger and shed some light where necessary. When race and gender is thrown into the mix some interesting findings were also revealed. The study found that girls in 12-19, nearly 27.7% of blacks, and 19.9% of Mexicans Americans were obese as opposed to 14.5% of white. With respect to boys, 6 to 11, 27.5% of Mexican Americans and 18.6% of blacks were super-obese compared to 15.5 % of whites. No data on Asian children were obtained. What this means for many of us will now experience serious problems in acquiring our Wii fit that recently came out by Nintendo. Well then, one cannot win it all. It took me a very long time to acquire my Wii in the first place.