Abstract
Childhood obesity appears, when there develops a discrepancy between energy intake and expenditure, causing to disturb the original steady state and formation of a fresh steady state at a higher level, which results in increased body-fat storage. Balance needs to be created between tissue synthesis (height gain) and fat storage (mass gain) in order to avoid children becoming obese. There are a number of definitions of childhood obesity given by various researchers, notable among them are those working with the European Childhood Obesity Group (ECOG). During 2013-2017, the First- to the FifthGeneration Solutions of Childhood Obesity were proposed by our group. The last one consisted of a mathematical definition of childhood obesity. It related the logical definition, ‘a child is considered to be obese if the incumbent is recommended to lose net weight during a course of the next 6 months based on the youngster’s mass-management goals generated from Growth-and-Obesity Vector-Roadmap’ to the mathematical criterion, ‘a child is classified as obese if the difference between the youngster’s mass percentile (at the most-recent checkup) and reference percentile exceeds +15’. This paper explores the proposed mathematical definition by applying this criterion to anthropometric data collected during 15 years ending in 2013. Data were investigated by changing the value of difference around +15. Best results were obtained when the parameter was set equal to +15. Out of 1183 children (302 males, 881 females), 124 had the difference greater than +15. Among these 124 children, 38 showed true obesity according to the logical definition.
