Nearly one million American teenagers are already in the firing line for diabetes and heart disease according to official US government figures, an international obesity organisation said today.

        The warning from the International Obesity TaskForce came as business leaders, including Coca Cola chairman Douglas Daft, met US Secretary of Health Tommy Thomspon who was leading a special session discussing the obesity epidemic at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

        "The evidence that it is not just obesity affecting youngsters, but a combination of serious risk factors termed the metabolic syndrome, has been in the hands of the Tommy Thompson's Department of Health and Human Services for nearly 10 years," said Prof Philip James, chairman of the IOTF.

        "It is astonishing that there has been so little said and even less done about this. These young people are already affected by serious complications due to gaining weight," he added.

        Data showing that more than one third of American teenagers classified as overweight or at risk also have metabolic syndrome risk factors came from a major US survey, the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted between 1988 and 1994 and was analysed by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which is also the headquarters of the Coca Cola corporation.

        The analysis, disclosed in a scientific paper in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, showed that the metabolic syndrome affected one in 25 of all youngsters from 12 to 19. But when broken down by weight, 28.7% of overweight adolescents (95th centile) and 6.8% of at-risk adolescents (85th-95th centile)showed positive for metabolic syndrome. The investigators, led by the CDC Director of Nutrition, Dr William Dietz, concluded: "Based on population-weighted estimates, approximately 910,000 US adolescents have the metabolic syndrome. These findings may have significant implications for both public health and clinical interventions directed at this high-risk group of mostly overweight young people."

        Prof James, whose organization this week delivered a major report for WHO on the world's childhood obesity problems, said the one million American teenagers gave the perfect reason for the USA and other governments to support the the World Health Organization's global strategy on diet and the prevention of chronic diseases.

        "Children don't make personal choices over the environment they grow up in. We have all the sound science we need from some of Tommy

Thompson's own experts to show that youngsters are becoming increasingly vulnerable to highly inappropriate diets of junk food and sugary drinks combined with low levels of activity which is now resulting in high levels of obesity, the unprecedented development of type 2 diabetes and exposure to cardiovascular risks from an early age," he added.

        United States efforts to stall the global strategy on diet at the World Health Organization's Executive Board this week  resulted in a failure to endose proposals in full, instead giving a further month for governments to feed back comments. The US Department of Health and Human Services sparked a furore by sending a 28 page set of amendments, seen primarily to be motivated by concerns to favour US sugar producers and avoid endorsing WHO proposed recommendations to restrict added sugars to less than 10% of the daily diet. The attack prompted the chairman of the WHO's global strategy reference group, Prof Kaare Norum, to write to Tommy Thompson expressing his "grave concern" at the attitude adopted by the USA which has participated in consultations and had been represented on his group.

        A further setback for the USA occurred on Friday when an application on behalf of a committee of the Grocery Manufacturers of America seeking to be given formal status with WHO as a non-governmental organization was rejected while further inquiries are made about the commercial links of the "non-profit" group and possible connections with the tobacco industry, which WHO is prevented from dealing with. The public interest only Council of International NGO Representatives in Geneva lodged a formal protest to the Executive Board that a proposal to recognize the GMA and its European counterpart, the CIAA, would be licensing industry lobbyists, whose primary interests were not health but profit and whose members included some of the producers of junk foods and soft drinks that WHO is seeking to negotiate with.

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Prof James is chairman of the International Obesity TaskForce and vice president of the International Union of
Nutritional Sciences. He chaired the United Nations Commission on the Nutritional Challenges of the 21st Century. He was adviser to the UK prime minister, providing the blueprint for the development of the Food Standards Agency in Britain and the European Food Safety Agency in the EU.