• Obesity EPI

We have published prevalence estimates for overweight and obesity in German children for the decade following German reunification in this journal,1 using internationally based cut-offs as proposed by Cole et al.2 The studies from which the data were drawn had ethical approval from the medical associations in Bavaria and Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. We split the childrens' age into half-year age bands, ie, 5.0–<5.5, 5.5–<6.0 … 7.5–<8.0 years.

Our paper was recently criticised in the German Bundesgesundheitsblatt.3 The authors rightly state that we have used the cut-offs published for the respective lower boundaries of our age bands (eg, …