Daily HealthBeat Tip

Poor big teens.

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

More and more teenagers are growing overweight. It's been like that for decades. But the weight isn't spread around evenly. Some groups are worse off than others.

Among them, researchers say, are 15- to 17-year-olds in poor neighborhoods. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association says these teens are about 50 percent more likely than teens not living in poverty to weigh too much.

Richard Miech of Johns Hopkins University:

"What's really interesting is that this difference has emerged recently, in the past decade or so. In the 1970s and the 1980s, there was no difference in rates of adolescent overweight by poverty status." (11 seconds)

Miech believes these teens have become less active, and get more of their calories from soft drinks.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: July 10, 2006

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