Data raise alarm for UO professor.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

For local advocates striving to reverse the rise in childhood obesity, one of the biggest frustrations has been a lack of solid local data.

Aside from an annual statewide, self-reported public health survey of teens in each county, the only data to date have come from Head Start of Lane County, which collects the height and weight of its students - all of them 3- to 5-year-olds - twice a year. During the past five years, the percentage of overweight children - those with a body mass index (BMI) at or above the 95th percentile - has hovered between 17 percent and 21 percent.

Soon, though, accurate, widespread data may be available for school-age children. As part of her work with the Lane Coalition for Active Healthy Youth, University of Oregon nutritional anthropology professor Geraldine Moreno-Black has been analyzing height and weight data from schools that collect it and are willing to share it.

"We haven't had any baseline data" by which to gauge trends and changes, Moreno-Black said. "So we don't know, in Lane County, what's happening."

All elementary and middle schools received requests from Lane County Public Health asking for the information. So far, she has numbers from 39 schools, both rural and urban.

She's only about halfway through her work, but the results so far are alarming, she said. In some schools, as many as 30 percent of students are either overweight or "at risk" of overweight, with a BMI above the 85th percentile.

"I did not expect that," said Moreno-Black, whose area of study has focused more on undernourished populations in Thailand, Ecuador and elsewhere. Other schools, though, are closer to reported national averages that are about 20 percent, or even considerably lower.