Did you know the average child sees more than 40,000 advertisements a year; half of which are food ads, primarily sugared cereals, high calorie snacks, fast food advertisers, and soft drinks ads.

In Oregon, health officials are launching a public awareness ad campaign to help parents counter the “junk-food” commercials aimed at children.

The main suggestion in the report release on Tuesday by the independent Institute of Medicine and National Research Council called "Local Government Actions to Prevent Childhood Obesity" is to impose a junk food tax to help fight childhood obesity. An increasing problem in the US, childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Many blame the lifestyles and eating habits as the main reason for this increase.

While not new in the world of summer camps for kids to spend their summer vacation at, fat camps such as the one featured in the MTV show “Fat Camp”, Camp Pocono Trails in Pennsylvania is a fun option for many of today’s kids. Some of these camps have been around for 30 and 40 years and offer most of the fun traditional activities that one would think of for a summer camp for kids, but with a focus on proper diet, exercises and weight loss.

Childhood obesity has quadrupled in the last 40 years, which may mean today's children become the first generation to have a shorter lifespan than their parents, a leading obesity expert told the American Psychological Association on Saturday.

A unique partnership focusing on curbing childhood obesity has been selected to demonstrate its success to attendees at the annual meeting of the National Association of Counties (NACo) today in Nashville. The Nashville Collaborative, an innovative partnership between the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt and Metro’s Parks & Recreation Department develops and tests innovative, family-based, community-centered programs to reduce pediatric obesity.

The relationships between children and their parent of the same gender in the earliest years of life could be the key to understanding why some young people become obese and others do not, new research conducted by the EarlyBird Diabetes Study has shown.

As childhood obesity rates continue to increase, experts agree that more information is needed about the implications of being overweight as a step toward reversing current trends. Now, a new University of Missouri study has found that overweight children, especially girls, show signs of the negative consequences of being overweight as early as kindergarten.

By as early as 7 years of age, being obese may raise a child's future risk of heart disease and stroke, even without the presence of other cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, a new study found. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society's 91st Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

A new study published online in the journal Obesity provides further evidence that strict maternal control over eating habits – such as determining how much a child should eat and coaxing them to eat certain foods – during early childhood may not lead to significant future weight gain in boys or girls. Instead, this behavior may be a response to concerns over a child's increasing weight.

Stress may indeed be a direct contributor to childhood obesity. That's according to a new Iowa State University study finding that increased levels of stress in adolescents are associated with a greater likelihood of them being overweight or obese.

A new study indicates there may be yet another reason to reduce childhood obesity — it may help prevent allergies. The study published in the May issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology showed that obese children and adolescents are at increased risk of having some kind of allergy, especially to a food.

As childhood obesity continues its thirty-year advance from occasional curiosity to cultural epidemic, health care providers are struggling to find out why—and the reasons are many.