Are we too used to seeing overweight children?

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, heart researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have "found that a number of kids viewed as normal, healthy children by their parents and even the medical staff at the hospital were later found to have enlarged hearts -- a thickening in the wall of the main pumping chamber. Even some children under 10 years old showed signs of the condition, known as left ventricular hypertrophy, or LVH." From the article:

Given the attention on childhood obesity today, how could doctors not notice that these kids were heavy? One argument is that there are so many of them.

"We've grown so accustomed to an overweight child walking into the exam room that we've lost our visual representation of what a normal child is supposed to look like," says Tom Kimball, a pediatric cardiologist at the hospital. In short, overweight is the new "normal."

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