Big jump in youth obesity globally

SWITZERLAND: The number of obese children and adolescents worldwide has jumped tenfold in the past 40 years, a major study says.

Childhood and teen obesity rates have levelled off in the United States, northwest Europe and other rich countries, but remain ‘‘unacceptably high’’ there, researchers at Imperial College London and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday.

‘‘Over 40 years we have gone from about 11 million to a more than tenfold increase to over 120 million obese children and adolescents throughout the world,’’ lead author Majid Ezzati, of Imperial’s School of Public Health, said.

This means that nearly 8 per cent of boys and nearly 6 per cent of girls worldwide were obese in 2016, against less than one per cent for both sexes in 1975. An additional 213 million children aged 5-19 were overweight last year, but fell below the threshold for obesity, according to the largest ever study, based on height and weight measurements of 129 million people.

The researchers called for better nutrition at home and at school, and more physical exercise to prevent a generation from becoming adults at greater risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancers because of excessive weight. Taxation and tough restrictions on marketing of junk food should be considered, it said.

If current trends continue, in 2022 there will be more obese children and teenagers worldwide than underweight ones, who now number 192 million, half of them in India, the study said.

Polynesia and Micronesia had the highest rates of child obesity last year, 25.4 per cent in girls and 22.4 per cent in boys, followed by ‘‘the high-income Englishspeaking region’’ that includes the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Britain.

-