CHARLESTON, W.Va.—West Virginia’s population of overweight fifth-graders has increased this year, and that’s good news.

It’s an encouraging sign because the number of obese fifth-graders is dropping significantly, putting those slimmer students into the overweight category and, with any luck, on the way toward a healthy weight.

“It’s at least a move in the right direction,” said Dr. William Neal, director of the CARDIAC Project, which provides health screenings to elementary school children in all 55 West Virginia counties.

The numbers are a rare glimmer of hope in the third-fattest state in the country, but isolating which factors are contributing to the drop in obesity may not be easy.

The CARDIAC Project, which began conducting screenings in 2003, gave The Associated Press data for the latest school year that show declines in unhealthy weights throughout the elementary school-age population.

In the 2006-07 school year, the project reported 27.7 percent of fifth-graders were obese, based on their body mass index. That’s dropped in the current school year to 25.8 percent.

The percentage of both overweight and obese students in the other grades screened by the project also declined from last year. The biggest declines were among obese kindergartners, falling from nearly 20 percent to about 17 percent, and overweight second-graders, a drop from 19 percent to 15 percent.

“It’s very encouraging to see this magnitude of decrease in the obesity and overweight rates,” Neal said. “The state’s investment in the prevention of obesity is paying off.”

Still, About 21 percent of all West Virginia children are obese, up from 17 percent in 2004, according to the Trust For America’s Health. Nationally, the rate is about 17 percent.

Neal said an aggressive approach to informing parents about the dangers of obesity, coupled with a statewide promotion of healthy lifestyles, has started to pay off.

Other states taking a similarly aggressive approach to combat obesity early have begun to see declines as well.

Arkansas, another state bedeviled by high obesity rates among children and adults, reported in 2006 that the percentage of children who were overweight or at risk of becoming overweight was 37.5 percent, down from 38.1 in 2004.

Since then, the numbers have held steady, leading state officials to hope the problem has leveled off.

“We have seen a halt in the progress of the childhood obesity epidemic statewide,” said Arkansas Surgeon General Joseph Thompson.

Nationally, the rate of childhood obesity has tripled in the last two decades.

Even getting obese children into the overweight category is an improvement, said Dr. Stephen Daniels, chief pediatrician at The Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colo.

“You don’t have to get down to an average body mass index right away to see results,” he said. “Even a mild reduction can be very beneficial.”

Health promotion efforts often focus on involving parents, but Daniels said the real challenge can be convincing children of the seriousness of the issue.

“Children and adolescents tend to think of themselves as healthy, and they tend not to be concerned about long-term health impacts,” he said.

To that end, West Virginia has tried everything from dance-related video games in schools to increasing the amount of time spent in physical education classes.









, all aimed at combating a problem that costs state health plans more than $200 million annually.

Charleston’s Kenna Elementary School is practically a laboratory of such initiatives, with successful experiments ranging from a healthy breakfast bar to a walking program that charts classes’ progress on a huge map of the United States.

Fifth-grade teacher Kathy Graley’s class uses a Web-based program called Healthy Hearts, which gives responses to input from students about what they eat and how much they exercise.

“My kids love it,” she said. “They can do it at home, their parents can do it at home. You notice a real change right away.”