Obesity has been described as the biggest threat to the lives of most people in the world, over and above natural disasters, war, crime, or famine.
It has been called a “global pandemic that far outweighs any other”, associated with lifestyle related diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, among other ‘preventable’ illnesses by the international health sector.
“Obesity is a driver and co-condition of these illnesses,” researchers at Wits University have said.
“Obesity is a real yet ignored global pandemic, which, in southern Africa, affects 41% of women and 11% of men over the age of 15 years.”
As the healthcare fraternity turned its collective attention to obesity last week, the differences between being overweight and being obese were clarified. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said being overweight was a condition of excessive fat deposits while obesity was a chronic complex disease defined by excessive fat deposits that could impair health.
The WHO said: “Obesity can lead to increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, it can affect bone health and reproduction, it increases the risk of certain cancers.”
Being overweight, while not chronic, could lead to all types of mortality, high blood pressure or hypertension, high and low cholesterol levels and high levels of triglycerides (dyslipidemia), the WHO noted.
The high levels of ill health among children, caused by poor diet and which, left unchecked, could lead to the pandemic becoming more uncontrollable than it already was. This topic emerged in the lead up to and after the commemoration of World Obesity Day.
Themed ‘'Let's Talk About Obesity &’’(correct) organisations across the world made the call for children to become the focus of change. In a webinar the WHO said there was urgent need to take stock of the global obesity crisis and how it was affecting young people. It was important to discuss the role of young people in the WHO Acceleration Plan to Stop Obesity.
“This is to hear and understand the lived realities of young people in a diverse set of countries, to investigate what it will take to spark a global youth movement to address these realities, and to establish what young people are asking for, and how to deliver.”
Pundits said said the food industry and marketing teams did not take into consideration the long-term effects of food and eating on the health of nations.
“Pre-school is a crucial phase in the development and growth of physical, social, and mental well-being. Thus, a South African childhood obesity prevention program was developed to promote healthy eating behaviour in young children aged two to five years, and it is aimed at caregivers and mothers of preschool children,” says a report entitled ‘South African-Based Childhood Obesity Prevention Programme’.
The report, released in January, says an estimated 42 million children under the age of five are overweight or obese around the world, 35 million of them living in low- or middle-income countries.
“Obesity is on the rise worldwide and has been ranked as the fifth leading cause of death among children. Consequently, the WHO identified childhood obesity as one of the highest priorities,” it said.
Experts in the health sector pointed out that there was little to no effort to manage and control the proper intake of nutrition among the country’s youngest population, from pre-school age through to adolescence.
“The milk they are given from birth to what is used to supplement it, lacks nutritional value,” Pretoria dietician Nomalizo Boya said.
Babies, she said, were weaned off the breast to be given milk with nutrients they should not be on, and that started them on the journey to bad health and unhealthy eating decisions.
“Then there is the habit of rewarding them with sugary treats - sweets and other snacks when they have done good, that goes all all the way to adulthood,” she added.
This went hand in hand with poverty and a lack of information “When a mother can give them nothing balanced to eat because she cannot afford to, who can blame her,” she asked.
In other instances it was because parents and schools did not know any better. “Check school tuck-shops out, what our children are being sold is beyond shocking, from food high in cholesterol to sugar laden, a lack of what they should eat to keep them alive longer and develop their minds and bodies, to what one sees as they walk through town, where school kids buy food no dietician would recommend. It is heartbreaking.”
One aspect that was a let down was watching how babies were discharged from hospitals in the arms of parents who had no idea of their nutritional needs. Some mothers were forced to rush back to work, and so began the journey of feeding their babies to fill their stomachs, with no notice given to the effects.
“Some pre-schools and schools engage dieticians to develop healthy meal plans, but children go home to eat anything and everything, and this undoes what any well-meaning plan implements. The need to teach, to raise awareness, to educate our country from rural areas to urban, rich to poor and in between, that while having fat on your body may look beautiful on some, on others it spells disease and death. So many children develop and walk around with non-communicable diseases as people applaud them for looking well fed. Something needs to change, and urgently,” Boya said.
The power to do that, she said, lay with the powers that be -the government.
Sunday Independent
ntando.makhubu@inl.co.za