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GLOBALLY, THERE HAS been more than a ten-fold increase in the number of children and teenagers with obesity in the past four decades.
In Ireland, this is no different, with 10% of boys and 9% of girls obese, compared to just 1% in 1975.
Stats published in the Lancet said that 31% of boys, and 30% of girls, were overweight in 2016, compared to 10.1% and 8.8% in 1975.
The proportion of children and teenagers in Ireland has halved since 1975, falling from 12% to 6%.
We rank 79th out of 200 countries for the prevalence of obesity. We have fallen two places to 58th in the table of countries with the highest incidence of overweight teens.
Global problem
There has been an increase from 5 million obese girls in 1975 to 50 million in 2016, and from six million to 74 million boys, according to a new global analysis of trends in child and teen obesity in 200 countries.
Rates of child and adolescent obesity were highest (over 30%) in some islands in Polynesia, while around 20% were obese in the US and some countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia) and the Caribbean (Bermuda and Puerto Rico).
The study, led by Imperial College London and the World Health Organisation, brought together data from 2,416 studies involving 128.9 million participants worldwide, including 31.5 million children and teens aged five to 19 years to estimate trends in body mass index (BMI).
Excessive weight gain in children and teens is linked to a higher risk and earlier onset of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, worse psychosocial and educational outcomes, and lifelong damages since weight loss is difficult to achieve.
“While average BMI among children and adolescents has recently plateaued in Europe and North America, this is not an excuse for complacency as more than one in five young people in the USA and one in 10 in the UK are obese,” study author Dr James Bentham of University of Kent said.
Additionally, rates of child and adolescent obesity are accelerating in east, south and southeast Asia, and continue to increase in other low and middle-income regions.
In addition to the 124 million children and adolescents classified as obese in 2016, 213 million children and teenagers were in the overweight range.
Preventing obesity
The authors of the study noted that additional work needs to be done across the world to ensure that obesity can be properly dealt with.
They said that policies to prevent childhood obesity in entire countries and communities need to be matched by improved treatments, such as behavioural therapy to change diet and exercise, screening and management of hypertension and liver problems, and in extreme cases, bariatric surgery.
“While there have been some initiatives led by governments, communities or schools to increase awareness about childhood and adolescent obesity, most high-income countries have been reluctant to use taxes and industry regulations to change eating and drinking behaviours to tackle child obesity,” Professor Majid Ezzati, study author from Imperial College London said.
Most importantly, very few policies and programmes attempt to make healthy foods such as whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables affordable to poor families.
In contrast
Despite the increase in child and adolescent obesity, globally more children remain moderately or severely underweight than obese, with 75 million girls moderately or severely underweight in 2016, along with 117 million boys.
Almost two-thirds of the world’s children and teenagers who are moderately or severely underweight lived in South Asia.
Meanwhile, the average BMI in 2016 was lowest for boys and girls in Ethiopia. It was also low in Niger, Senegal, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Cambodia.
Underweight among children and adolescents is linked to higher risk of infectious disease. For girls of childbearing age, it’s associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes including maternal mortality, delivery complications, preterm birth and slow growth.
Between 1975 and 2016, the prevalence of moderate and severe underweight decreased from 9.2% to 8.4% in 2016 for girls, and from 14.8% to 12.4% for boys. This means that the rate of increase in obesity in children and teens is greater than the rate of decline in undernutrition.
In conclusion, Ezzati said:
There is a continued need for policies that enhance food security in low-income countries and households, especially in South Asia.
“But, our data also show that the transition from underweight to overweight and obesity can happen quickly in an unhealthy nutritional transition, with an increase in nutrient-poor, energy-dense foods.
Our findings highlight the disconnect between the global dialogue on overweight and obesity, which has largely overlooked the remaining undernutrition burden.
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No one seems interested in the basic function of farming, creating food.!Any suggestions on what we should eat when all the rewilding is complete!
@Tommy Lennon: Nearly all the food we produce is exported though, so rewilding vast swathes of land wouldn’t affect our access to food.
@Tommy Lennon: Heather!! This hogwash is really going overboard. 5.2 Million people have to eat something!!
Few years ago they couldn’t give away enough money to reclaim land, bogs were drained, ditches bulldozed to make fields bigger now give more money to put it back, what next
@Andy Murphy: it’s as if priorities can change over time.
Mad, Ted!
@Ciaran Foster: or money changes hands ?
Totally agree. I bought the book from Eoghan back in December as a present but could not stop reading it.. great eye opener when walking around any nature area and looking at our human shaped environment.
Bought the book. Eoghan knows what he is talking about, we should listen
Lord save us from this stuff, so we return good farmland to the so called wild bush,
I have known so called farmers like this and they were to lazy to work their land and produce food, this was their cop out for not working their inheritance farm,
The boyo who wrote this article seems like one of them.
@Ned: You sound bitter. Were they “to” lazy to learn to spell also?
Every day I read or hear about another demand from the “Green Agenda”. Previously I would have considered myself environmentally conscious but I have rapidly become less so due to the polarised views presented.
More tree planting, ditch fertiliser (go organic) , drop bovines and ovines 20% in favor of grains and vegetables. Pay farmers to do so. Targets met… Simple..and it will be done.
Folks, do yourselves a favour and read his book.
Great book, highly recommend!
I’ve no problem to pay farmers to rewind their farms
But let’s house the homeless fix our health first eh?
We should change our approach to land use. A farm should be an inclosed area where sheep / goat / cows won’t go outside to graze on every little tree sapling. Same for sikka deer that has gone out of control in recent years. Nature and biodiversity has no chance in this country atm.
There are 8 Billion people on this planet that have to be fed every day and this idiot wants us to grow weeds. Enough of this nonsense. No matter what we do on this little island it will make little or no difference to global warming. We’re not the cause of the problem, but we could help alleviate the consequences.
@Liam Dunne: well we are the cause of the problem, rich countries like ireland are the ones who consume the most and produce the most carbon per capita, we still contribute to the overall problem
@Liam Dunne: It’s not about global warming, it’s about biodiversity. Read the article, then try reading some books.
We need all houses to be carbon neutral…citizens deserve at least cheap/free heating.
I’ve noticed a lot of hedgerows getting torn out of grazing fields near me over the last 2-3 winters.
It makes little sense, the farmer only gains a few square meters of space. Then any farm animals in the fields lose shelter from the elements during wind, rain & heat.
And of course nature loses its last piece of wilderness on the edge of the field.
Is there some sort of subsidy to do this sort of work or why is it being done?
So you want us to pay farmers to not work on the least viable part of their land. Sure.
@Dan Dare: they would need money to maintain fences to keep deer, sheep & goats off the land while it recovers.
Kill an extra quarter of a million cows a year and rewild as much land as possible . What will people eat if this goes ahead ? And there is no point in saying that we export most of what we produce as if that makes its consumption somewhere else on the planet irrelevant
Unbelievable, I grew up in a large farming community. Farmers are so so wealthy. The new generation of farmers are splashing the cash, massive mansions, big 4×4′s, new cars etc. Some small farmers may struggle a little like the rest of us. But the cash the big dairy guys are rolling in is unbelievable!
have your say