How many of these kids are on a constant medication?
Whenever someone talks about the childhood obesity epidemic, it always makes me wonder how many of these kids are on some kind of medication that could be causing this, since weight gain tends to be an "acceptable" side-effect in many medications. I know this firsthand battling this problem with seizure medications when I was little. I was on this medication for about a decade, and about 6 months after I went off of the stuff, my overweight body had shrunk down to about half the size it was before, with no other changes in my diet or exercise.