More children are attempting to shed extra pounds today than nearly twenty years ago, a team of researchers has found. Even those that have a “healthy” weight are attempting to slash some kilos.

For his or her study, published within the Archives of Disease in Childhood, the researchers checked out data from 34,000 children aged 8 to 17 who were participants within the Health Survey for England (HSE) from 1997 to 2016, the University of Oxford noted in a news release.

They looked specifically at “common” weight reduction attempts within the group and located that 26.5% of youngsters actually reported that they tried to shed extra pounds between 2015-2016. This was a “significant increase over time” in comparison with 1997-1998 when the speed was 21.4%, in accordance with The Guardian. The most important increases were said to be amongst those in lower-income households, in older children, boys and Asian children.

“Overall, we saw that the number of youngsters reporting weight reduction attempts is growing at a faster rate than the rise in extra weight,” a co-lead, Dr. Aryati Ahmad of the University of Oxford, currently based at Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia, said within the university news release.

There was a little bit of concentrate on childhood obesity in recent times. In England, authorities published the rules on stopping and treating extra weight in children in 2006, the university noted. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also called childhood obesity a “significant issue” within the country, affecting 14.7 million children and adolescents from 2017-2020. And in accordance with the World Health Organization (WHO), greater than 340 million kids and adolescents aged 5 to 19 were chubby or obese in 2016.

Nonetheless, the researchers’ data showed that there was also a rise in weight reduction attempts amongst the kids considered to have a “healthy weight.” More specifically, the rise was 9% to 39.3% amongst those that were considered chubby, 32.9% to 62.6% amongst those considered obese and 5.3% to 13.6% amongst those that were considered to have a healthy weight, The Guardian noted.

“This raises concerns and suggests greater attention is required to focus on weight control messages appropriately,” said Dr. Ahmad.

“We’ve been seeing an increase in boys weight-reduction plan — it is not just girls doing it,” one in every of the study authors, Melissa Little of the University of Oxford, added, as per the BBC News. “While a few of the teenagers and kids who’re weight-reduction plan are chubby, some are usually not. We have really got to take into consideration getting the proper health messaging across.”

Furthermore, the rise in weight reduction attempts within the age group reportedly doesn’t coincide with a rise in weight management services available to them in England, in accordance with the university. This risk prompts a rise in “unsupervised and potentially inappropriate” weight control practices and stresses the necessity for weight management support for those with obesity within the age group.

Within the meantime, the researchers emphasized the necessity for more research to grasp why there may be a rise in weight reduction efforts amongst young individuals with a healthy weight.

“The news that increasingly more children look like taking their weight seriously is most welcome, but this success should be greeted with a touch of caution,” Tam Fry, the chair of the National Obesity Forum, said, as per The Guardian. “It’s concerning that children with a healthy weight look like ‘weight-reduction plan’ they usually needs to be gently told to snap out of it.”