Doctors may be getting childhood obesity wrong, new research suggests

A new global definition of childhood obesity is reframing how doctors evaluate youth health, looking past traditional body mass index (BMI) measurements to focus on actual physiological impacts.

According to research from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, just 2.1% to 4.9% of children and adolescents qualify as clinically obese under the revised standard, compared to 7% to 10.8% under standard BMI calculations.

Dr. Danielle Longmore, a pediatrician at the Melbourne institute...