I was eating Cheerios for breakfast one morning when I realized the box I bought came with a coupon for diapers. “Is my cereal trying to tell me something?” I wondered. At a barbecue recently I noticed the baby pool seemed a little more crowded than it was a year or two ago. Then came a flood of facebook updates. Everywhere I went it seemed someone else was expecting one of those little, expensive bundles of joy. And every time they told me I couldn’t help but think, “I have a coupon for you.”
 
Dr. A. Elizabeth Sloan, president of Sloan Trends, Inc., Escondido, CA, recently confirmed for me that: “America is in the midst of the largest Baby Boom in its history.” Unfortunately, like parenting, it’s not all smiles and celebrations all the time; 32% of U.S. kids are overweight—10% of infants and 1 in 7 preschoolers. By 2015, one-third of American kids will be obese. Hispanic births outpace the general population 4:1, and the incidence of overweight and obesity among minority children is already very high: 27% of Mexican-American kids ages 2 to 5 are overweight, as are 26% of Black kids and 21% of White kids.
 
Poor diet, physical inactivity, excessive engagement with varying forms of media and advertising of junk food all contribute to childhood obesity, according to a recent policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that appears in the July issue of Pediatrics.
 
“We’ve created a perfect storm for childhood obesity—media, advertising and inactivity,” said the statement’s lead author, Victor Strasburger, MD, FAAP, a member of the AAP Council on Communications and Media. “American society couldn’t do a worse job at the moment of keeping children fit and healthy—too much TV, too many food ads, not enough exercise and not enough sleep.”
 
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) responded to the AAP statement, saying in recent years its members have: changed more than 20,000 products to reduce calories, fat, sodium and sugar; pledged to remove 1.5 trillion calories from the food supply by 2015; and applied strict nutrition criteria to advertising. But let’s face it: kids are still unhealthy.
 
And adults aren’t faring much better either. During the last 30 years, diabetes cases among people 25 years of age and older have doubled to 347 million worldwide, according to research recently published in The Lancet. The U.S. accounted for nearly 25 million diabetics in 2008, almost triple the number from three decades ago. While much of the increase can be attributed to population growth and aging, a significant portion can be linked to changing diets, rising obesity and growing rates of physical inactivity, researchers noted.
 
Society is bulging at the belt, from both ends. So there’s a lot riding on the next generation’s shoulders. Let’s hope they can put the iPad down, get off the couch and save us from ourselves.