Where kids live affects being under, overweight
WASHINGTON — The weight problems that preoccupy Americans typically are about how to lose weight, not gain it.
But a recent study published in the Lancet provides a sobering look at how much the relationship children globally have with food and weight depends on where they live.
The study reports the number of obese children has increased more than tenfold in the past four decades — from 5 million girls in 1975 to 50 million in 2016, and from 6 million boys in 1975 to 74 million in 2016.
Overall, 1 in children on the every planet 5 is either obese, meaning more than two standard deviations from the median on growth charts, or overweight, meaning more than one standard deviation.
The analysis, led by Imperial College London in collaboration with the World Health Organization, involves data on nearly 129 million children 5 to 19 in 200 countries. Study author Majid Ezzati, a researcher at the college’s School of Public Health, and his collaborators say it is the most comprehensive database ever on this topic. But there’s a flip side. Despite the big increases in obesity, there are still more children who remain moderately or severely underweight, especially in the poorest corners of the world.
An estimated 75 million girls and 117 million boys are moderately or severely underweight, meaning greater than one standard deviation from median on the WHO charts. Almost two-thirds of these children live in South Asia, where some governments’ ability to feed their citizens has been unable to keep up with countries’ booming populations.
“We have wide and widening inequalities. Even though we may see some signs of improvement, we cannot be complacent, and we need to ramp up our actions much more significantly to act across the life-course and across all of society,” said Harry Rutter, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
While being overweight is associated with earlier onset of cardiac and metabolic issues and some cancers, being underweight also can carry serious consequences. The percentage of boys and girls who are underweight correlates with poverty.
Starting in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, much of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America were affected.