Overweight and obesity in young people according to national and international standards.

Obesity is among the most important public health problems in developed countries and a risk factor associated with the development of the main chronic diseases. The increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents seen in the past two decades is particularly worrying. Body mass index (BMI, weight in kilograms/height in meters squared) is the parameter that best defines obesity in children and adolescents. There is however no agreement on the cut-off points and tables to be used. Standards derived from both national and international series are available and are used for this purpose. Such standards include those reported by Cole et al. in 2000 and recommended for use by expert committees such as the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), which define obesity and overweight based on extrapolation of adult BMI values of 30 kg/m and 25 kg/m, respectively. In the Spanish population, the percentile tables of the Fundación Orbegozo have been used, using the 85th percentile as the limit for overweight and the 95th percentile as the cut-off point for defining obesity, as recommended by the European Children Obesity Group (ECOG). However, other authors have preferred to use the 90th and 97th percentiles, respectively. It is therefore not easy to make comparisons between the results of different studies because the criteria used to define overweight and obesity are not the same: not all of them use the same tables as reference or the same cut-off point. The purpose of this study was to compare the prevalence of overweight and obesity in an adolescent population of the Spanish province of Caceres using different criteria and references based on BMI.