Child obesity seen at crisis levels
Obesity among the nation’s children has reached historic highs, with diseases once associated with the middleaged now affecting teenagers and young adults, Canada’s top doctor warned Monday.
“Canada is facing an obesity epidemic. Never in our nation’s history have the overweight and obesity rates in children been this high,” Dr. David Butler-jones, Canada’s chief public health officer, said at a national summit in Ottawa on Monday on the childhood obesity crisis.
“The risk is that this will be the first generation of children not to live as long or as healthy as their parents. That indeed is a great tragedy.
“We didn’t get this way overnight. It won’t be overnight that we get out of it and it isn’t a single solution.”
Obesity isn’t just a problem of childhood: The one-day summit on healthy weights, which brought together federal and provincial health officials, doctors, researchers, dietitians, the food industry and other groups, heard that unless the trends change, by 2026, 70 per cent of adults in Canada will be overweight or obese, compared with 59 per cent today.
Obesity among children and adolescents is tracking at an even faster pace than obesity among adults. The proportion of teenage boys classified as overweight or obese has more than doubled since 1981, climbing to 31 per cent in 2009.
Among teenage girls over the same time period, it has increased to 25 per cent from 14 per cent.
Over the past 26 years, Canada’s youth have grown “heavier, rounder and weaker” and doctors are now seeing obesity-related complications such as hypertension, joint disease, sleep apnea and Type 2 diabetes in young people, said Dr. Tom Warshawski, chair of the Childhood Obesity Foundation.
But perhaps even more harmful to children is the ridicule and stigma that goes along with being overweight. Weight “is probably the last publicly acceptable prejudice,” he said.
In movies, “villains are usually overweight; dumb people are usually overweight,” he said. The stigma starts as early as age three or five. Children at that age who are overweight — and especially if they are obese — “are viewed as somehow morally deficient, gluttonous . . . even within a family.”
Obese children have ranked the quality of their lives lower than that of children with cancer, Warshawksi said.
Despite the scope of the problem, only a “smattering” of obesity treatment programs for children exist in Canada, the gathering heard. Participants called on the government to restrict the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children, saying voluntary restrictions aren’t working.
Federal health minister Leona Aglukkaq acknowledged that children are “targets” for marketers, but said parents need to accept some responsibility for the foods their children are eating.