April 2025

Advancing Physical Activity Research: NCCOR Workgroup Hosts Interactive Workshop at Active Living Conference

April 2025, NCCOR

As research continues to highlight the critical role of physical activity in obesity prevention and overall child wellbeing, NCCOR is working to identify and address key gaps in the field. An NCCOR workgroup—comprised of NCCOR members and researchers from the Center for Nutrition and Health Impact—has been analyzing gaps in physical activity research using findings from authoritative sources like the Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF) Findings for Physical Activity and the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Report. The workgroup is developing a framework to help researchers and practitioners pinpoint gaps and identify strategies to address them. Learn more about NCCOR’s physical activity efforts here.

To put these findings into action, the workgroup, represented by Dr. Laura Balis, Center for Nutrition and Health Impact, hosted an interactive workshop at the Active Living Conference in Manhattan, KS, on March 19. The session focused on collaborations to advance dissemination and implementation opportunities identified by the gap analysis. Participants explored community- and practitioner-engaged approaches and applied dissemination and implementation models, methods, and measures to develop physical activity-related initiatives.

Workshop discussions highlighted a strong interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration, meaningful community engagement, and evaluating the effectiveness of existing interventions. As NCCOR continues this work, these insights will help shape future efforts to bridge research gaps and drive innovation in physical activity research.

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NCCOR Toolbox: Spring into Move More Month with NCCOR’s Active Travel to School (ATS) Initiative

April 2025, NCCOR

Spring has arrived, the weather is warming up, and it’s the perfect time to get moving! April is Move More Month, making it a great opportunity to encourage walking and biking to school. NCCOR’s Active Travel to School (ATS) initiative aimed to improve public health surveillance of youth ATS across three content areas: youth ATS behaviors, environmental supports for ATS, and program and policy supports for ATS. Through a comprehensive literature review, NCCOR has assessed existing surveillance of youth ATS and identified measures used to evaluate it, highlighting the many benefits of active travel, such as increased physical activity and reduced traffic congestion. Learn more about the history of the ATS project and discover a suite of published resources to advance research in this area here.

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Rural Households Accounted for Nearly One-Sixth of U.S. Food-Insecure Households in 2023

February 19, 2025, U.S. Department of Agriculture

People in some areas of the United States are more likely than others to be food insecure, meaning they struggled to provide enough food for their household members within the past year. In 2023, 15.9 percent of food-insecure U.S. households were outside of metropolitan areas (rural households). The food insecurity rate for rural households was 15.4 percent, compared with 13.5 percent for all U.S. households. These data show groups that are at increased risk of food insecurity as well as the frequency of a group’s occurrence in the food-insecure population. For example, while the prevalence of food insecurity for suburban and exurban households near principal cities was 11.7 percent in 2023, this group accounted for 38.8 percent of food-insecure households. In contrast, the prevalence of food insecurity in 2023 was relatively high among households in principal cities (15.9 percent), but this group accounted for 33.2 percent of food insecure households. Data associated with this chart appear in the USDA, Economic Research Service report Household Food Security in the United States in 2023, published in September 2024.

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Children of Moms Who Smoked or Were Obese are More Likely to Become Obese Adults

March 26, 2025, EurekAlert!

A study finds that factors beyond a person’s control, like socioeconomic status and whether their mom smoked or was obese, can influence whether they are overweight or obese as teenagers or adults. Glenna Nightingale of the University of Edinburgh, UK and colleagues report these findings on March 26, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Obesity is considered to be a global public health concern, but experts still disagree about the precise origins and causes of rising obesity rates. One topic under debate is whether a person’s individual genetics and behaviors are more or less important than environmental factors, like socioeconomic status, in developing obesity.

In the new study, researchers estimated the impact of several factors on a person’s weight, including societal factors, like a person’s job type, as well as early life factors, like a person’s birth order, how they were delivered and whether their mother smoked or was obese. They looked specifically at whether a person was overweight, obese or severely obese at age 16 and age 42. They also looked at participants’ weight between ages 16 to 42, a range that spans the rise in obesity rates in the United Kingdom. The data came from the 1958 National Child Development Study, a long-term study that followed the lives of more than 17,000 people born in a single week in March 1958 across England, Scotland and Wales.

The analysis showed that if a mother was obese or if she smoked, her child was more likely to be obese or severely obese at each of the ages examined. The findings demonstrate that these early life factors can have a persistent effect on a person’s weight. Notably, these factors were just as powerful before and after the start of the rise in obesity rates in the UK, suggesting that the impact of individual factors, like behaviors, likely did not change during that time.

The results suggest that societal and early-life risk factors could be used to target obesity prevention programs for children and adults. The researchers also conclude that, since individual risk factors have not changed as obesity rates have risen, new studies are needed to identify societal factors that may have caused the current obesity pandemic.

The authors add: “Our research shows that the effect of maternal influences persists through to age 42 and that strikingly, those predictors were just as powerful (and prevalent) in the era before the current obesity pandemic began. This suggests that, as Geoffrey Rose pointed out, novel studies are needed of factors at the community/societal level that may have caused the current obesity pandemic, since individual-level risk factors appear not to have changed over the time period spanning the pandemic’s onset and growth.”

[Source]

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Study Uncovers Link Between Childhood Overweight and Obesity and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in Adulthood

March 21, 2024, EurekAlert!

New research to be presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2025, Malaga, Spain, 11-14 May) shows that having an overweight or obesity trajectory during childhood is associated with an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in adulthood. The study is by Frida Richter and Professor Jennifer Lyn Baker of The Center for Clinical Research and Prevention, Copenhagen University Hospital – Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg, The Capital Region of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues.

Attention towards risk factors for COPD other than smoking is increasingly being recognised in studies of environmental, occupational, and even early life factors. Although previous studies have suggested a link between adiposity and non-allergic asthma and lung function in adults, the association with COPD remains to be elucidated. Therefore, the aim was to examine if trajectories of body mass index (BMI) in childhood were associated with COPD.

The authors included data from 276,747 Danish children (137,493 girls) born from 1930–1982, who had between 2 and 12 weight and height measurements between ages 6–15 years from the Copenhagen School Health Records Register. Using a form of statistical modelling, five distinct childhood BMI trajectories were identified: below-average, average, above-average, overweight and obesity.

The authors then followed the individuals from 1977 to 2022 in national health care registers and identified individuals with a diagnosis of COPD from age 40 years onwards. Hazard ratios (HR) for COPD were estimated separately for women and men using statistical modelling.

The authors found that across the follow-up period 18,227 women and 15,789 men were diagnosed with COPD. Compared to women with an average childhood BMI trajectory, risks of chronic COPD were 10% higher for women who had an above-average trajectory, 26% higher for women who had an overweight trajectory and 65% higher for women with an obesity BMI trajectory

Compared to men with an average childhood BMI trajectory, risks of COPD were 7% higher for men with an above-average trajectory, 16% higher for men with an overweight trajectory and 40% higher for men with an obesity trajectory.

In contrast, a lower risk of future COPD was observed only for women with a below average childhood BMI trajectory – 9% lower compared to women with an average childhood BMI trajectory.

The authors conclude: “Having a BMI trajectory above average in childhood may increase the risk of subsequent COPD. Thus, our results suggest that overweight during this early period of life is an indicator of risk for the development of COPD.”

Reflecting on the potential causes of the association, they add: “Parental smoking and socioeconomic status are potential and unmeasured confounders in this study. However, since the effect estimates were consistent across birth cohorts, despite various medical, cultural, and socioeconomic changes (including smoking patterns) over the study period, the bias is considered limited meaning that overweight and obesity in childhood are likely to be independent indicators of risk for COPD in adulthood.”

[Source]

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Parental Perspectives on Their Child’s Body Image

March 11, 2025, Childhood Obesity

Poor body image is a prominent issue affecting youth. In this nationally representative online survey, we explored parents’ concerns about their child’s appearance, as well as their perceptions of their child’s body image concerns and related behaviors and interactions with others. Among the 1653 respondents, weight was parents’ most cited body image concern, while more parents perceived that their child was self-conscious about their weight than there were parents concerned about their child’s weight. Parental perceptions related to their child’s body image can inform providers’ efforts to address poor body image, such as around weight, and improve the health and self-esteem of their pediatric patients.

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Change in Child Opportunity Index in Early Childhood Is Associated with Youth BMI Growth

March 11, 2025, Childhood Obesity

Background: The neighborhood-level child opportunity index (COI) has been used in policy-based initiatives to identify and improve low-resource neighborhoods in order to impact child health. Understanding of how changes in COI can impact child growth, however, is lacking.

Methods: Participants were 1124 children from the Family Life Project, a longitudinal birth cohort of families in rural, high-poverty areas. Youth anthropometrics were measured at eight assessments (ages 2 months through 12 years). Neighborhood COI was obtained at seven assessments (ages 2 months through 5 years) and used to create seven trajectory groups representing a change in COI: stayed low on all seven assessments, stayed moderate, stayed high, left low, declined from moderate, declined from high, and bounced around.

Results: As hypothesized, moving from high COI neighborhoods into lower COI neighborhoods was associated with greater BMI growth and increased risk for obesity and severe obesity at 12 years. As hypothesized, the opposite effect, which approached significance at p = 0.056, was found among children who moved from low COI neighborhoods into higher COI neighborhoods. Specifically, moving into higher COI neighborhoods was associated with reduced BMI growth, and lower risk for severe obesity at 12 years.

Conclusions: Moving into higher COI neighborhoods may be associated with healthier BMI growth, while the opposite effect may occur when moving into lower COI neighborhoods. Given the use of the COI in public health initiatives and growing evidence for its potential positive impact on child growth, future work is needed to replicate our findings among larger diverse samples.

[Source]

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