Canada facing a troubling childhood obesity epidemic

Youth are ‘heavier, rounder and weaker’

Obesity among the nation’s children has reached historic highs, with diseases once associated with the middle-aged 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 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 oneday summit, 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 Canadian adults will be overweight or obese, compared to 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 3. 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 life 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. Dietitians working in publicly funded clinics described waiting lists 200 names long.

Participants called on the government to restrict the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children, saying voluntary restrictions aren’t working.

Canada’s health minister acknowledged that children are “targets” for marketers. But Leona Aglukkaq said parents need to accept some responsibility for the foods their children are eating.

“As parents, we are the ones that purchase the food for our children, we are the ones that feed our children unhealthy foods,” Aglukkaq told Postmedia News.

The national summit followed on the heels of two new studies by Canadian researchers cataloguing the human and economic toll of obesity.

One study, based on nearly 29,000 Ontario adults – half of whom were either overweight or obese – found that the obese were twice as likely to have three or more medical conditions than the normal-weight. They were more likely to be taking cardiac drugs and other medications and to be hospitalized.

The second study looked at the impact of severe obesity on the country’s largest rehabilitation hospital – the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton.

It followed 84 patients – half of them severely obese, the other half non-obese “controls” – admitted for rehab after orthopedic surgery, a serous medical illness or stroke, brain or spinal cord injury. The severely obese were younger, heavier (an average BMI of 51) and were more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea, neurological disease and kidney failure.

Their average length of stay was more than double that of the controls (98 versus 37 days). Nearly half that time was spent waiting to be discharged home or transferred a long-term care facility.