Nearly a third of world overweight, risking illness & death
Flower power: gardening as therapy in Poland
ROME, June 12, (Agencies): Nearly a third of the world’s population is obese or overweight and an increasing number of people are dying of related health problems in a “disturbing global public health crisis”, a study said on Monday.
Some 4 million people died of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and other ailments linked to excess weight in 2015, bringing death rates related to being overweight up 28 percent on 1990, according to the research.
“People who shrug off weight gain do so at their own risk,” said Christopher Murray, one of the authors of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 2015, excess weight affected 2.2 billion people equal to 30 percent of the world’s population, according to the study. Almost 108 million children and more than 600 million adults weighed in as obese, having a body mass index (BMI) above 30, said the research that covered 195 countries.
More than 60 percent of fatalities occurred among this group, the study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington found.
BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in metres squared, and is an indication of whether a person is a healthy weight.
A BMI score over 25 is overweight, over 30 is obese and over 40 is morbidly obese.
According to the World Health Organisation, obesity has more than doubled since 1980, reaching epidemic proportions.
Obesity rates among children were increasing faster than among adults in many countries, including Algeria, Turkey, and Jordan, the study said.
Meanwhile, almost 800 million people, including 300 million children, go to bed hungry each night, according to the United Nations.
Poor diets and sedentary lifestyles were mainly to blame for increasing numbers of overweight people, experts said.
Urbanisation and economic development have led to increasing obesity rates also in poor countries where part of the population doesn’t have enough to eat, as people ditch traditional, vegetable-rich diets for processed foods.
Research in Mexico, Brazil, China, South Korea and Britain by Londonbased Overseas Development Institute has shown that the cost of processed foods like ice cream, hamburgers, chips and chocolate has fallen since 1990, while the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables has gone up.
Also: RUSKIE PIASKI, Pologne:
An elderly woman leans over to smell a lush flowerbed of lavender in sprawling gardens surrounding an imposing early 20th-century palace in a pastoral corner of eastern Poland.
Slowly a smile lights up her face, erasing her previous stony expression — she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia which often renders her emotionless.
The sudden burst of happiness is one of the benefits of horticultural, or garden therapy, as it is better known.
She is among 59 female patients at this state-run, mental health care home in the village of Ruskie Piaski who are undergoing the springtime treatment, introduced here in 2014.
“Gardens provide an environment that stimulates many senses; the patient can smell the scents of flowers and plants, touch them, and even get pricked by thorns,” says biological scientist Bozena Szewczyk-Taranek, who has created a horticultural therapy training course at the Agricultural University of Krakow, due to start in September.
Even just getting them out of their rooms into the fresh air can help by improving their physical condition.
Alina Anasiewicz, the director of the Ruskie Piaski care home which is one of the leading centres in Poland for garden therapy, says she came across it on a 2013 study trip to Switzerland.
“We brought home quite a few of the methods we learnt from the Swiss,” she told AFP. She points proudly to a fountain, where, on hot days, patients can touch the flowing water and wade into a small pool with pebbles lining the bottom that tickle their feet.
To reach the fountain, patients must walk barefoot along a “sensory path”, of gravel, sand and wooden logs, allowing the varied textures to stimulate their senses.