Researching Obesity’s Complexity and Impact

Researching Obesity’s Complexity and Impact: As thousands of brainiac kids from around the globe began descending on the University of Tennessee for a week of Destination ImagiNation’s creative problem-solving summer camp, researchers in health and nutrition on the Knoxville campus couldn’t help noticing that scarcely any overly plump children were in that bunch of campers.

On average, they were less sedentary than their peers elsewhere. “And leaner than the kinds of kids you see going to Wal-Mart, especially in Tennessee, where the obesity rate is extremely high,” says Dr. Naima Moustaid-Moussa, co-director of UT’s multidisciplinary Obesity Research Center, one of several campuses with obesity projects associated with and partially financed by the National Institutes of Health.