A report looking at the health of kindergartners in Nevada says that rates for both overweight and underweight children are rising in the Silver State.
Each year, the Nevada Institute for Children's Research and Policy takes a look at the well-being of five-year-olds, specifically. Amanda Haboush-Deloye is chief researcher for the report and says it's official: a full third of Nevada children are either overweight or obese.
She recently spoke about that finding to our public radio partner KNPR in Las Vegas:
"Kids just aren't getting enough movement to burn the calories that are going into their bodies," she explains. "It's troublesome and this is going to keep growing if we don't make some changes."
The rate of overweight and obese children has been slowly growing over the past several years, while a very different problem has also been creeping up.
"In the same time that we have an over-eating problem," Haboush-Deloye says, "we still have families that are in so much poverty that they cannot provide food for their families, and so, you have kids that are malnourished and underweight because they're not getting the appropriate nutrients or enough food to sustain themselves throughout the day."
The number of kindergartners in Nevada who are underweight has jumped almost seven percent in the past year.
