Description: NEW YORK (AP) — The chicken nuggets are coming home to roost. By the time today's teens are middle age, the rate of heart disease could be 16 percent higher because of the extra pounds they are carrying around today, a U.S. study suggests.

A second study, by Danish researchers, documents a connection between excess weight in even younger kids and heart disease in adults — especially boys.

The two reports in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine may well be underestimating the future health effects of childhood obesity, said Dr. David Ludwig, director of an obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston.

"We've simply never had a generation that's been this heavy from so early in life. The consequences of that are unprecedented and unknown," said Ludwig, who was not involved in the research.

While the U.S. projections were based on a computer model, the Danish study is a large, decades-long look at what happened in real life to 277,000 children as they grew up. Some 14,5