About 69 percent of American adults are overweight or obese, and more than four in five people say they are worried about obesity as a public health problem, reports NPR:
“But a recent poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health revealed a curious schism in our national attitudes toward obesity: Only one in five kids had a parent who feared the boy or girl would grow up to be overweight as an adult.
“Put another way, assuming current trends persist, parents of 80 percent of American children think all these kids will somehow end up being among the lucky 31 percent of adults who are not overweight. Tali Sharot is a neuroscientist at University College London who studies why large numbers of people — faced with a large number of different kinds of risks — believe they and their family members will dodge the odds. “People underestimate their likelihood of experiencing all kinds of negative events, including medical illnesses,” she says. “And they do that for their family members as well. So not only do we think we are immune more than other people, we think that our kids are also more immune than other kids.”
“Psychologists have noted the phenomenon in a number of domains that have nothing to do with health: Most people getting married believe they will stay married forever, for example, even though the divorce rate is around 50 percent.”
More at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/03/04/173227718/your-childs-fat-mines-fine-rose-colored-glasses-and-the-obesity-epidemic