America's Broad Palette

Interior designers: think ahead-draw sturdy. A Centers for Disease Control study released this spring shows that a decade-long effort to promote physical activity among teen-agers has not been successful.

Interior designers: think ahead-draw sturdy. A Centers for Disease Control study released this spring shows that a decade-long effort to promote physical activity among teen-agers has not been successful.

As of 2003, a little more than half of U.S. high school students took P.E., and of those only 39 percent were actually physically active during the class.

Obesity has been a problem for adults for quite some time, however, the trickle down to youth is troubling: from 1980 to 2000, the prevalence of overweight children ages 12-19 tripled from 5 percent to 15 percent in 2000.

Is it any wonder interior designers with business clients now adapt design for a the range of females bodies that may vary 140 lbs., from the first to 99th percentile, according to a HermanMiller study.

Accordingly, the classic Aeron chair is now offered in sizes A, B, and C. And while the two studies are not parallel, another interesting report by the CDC was released last month. It found that while ER visits reached an all-time high of 114 million in 2003 (a 26 percent increase from 1993) the number of emergency departments declined 14 percent in the same period.

The national population rose 12 percent in that decade; the number of those 65 and over rose roughly 10 percent.