Food labelling could be a clearer way to beat obesity
Labels warning consumers how unhealthy some packaged foods are may help curb the UAE’s obesity rate – which is double the global average, experts suggested.
Ahead of the Gulf Obesity Summit and Regional Congress 2018, today and tomorrow in Abu Dhabi, officials and delegates are already calling for tighter regulations to combat the epidemic that affects 1.9 billion people worldwide.
Chief among the recommendations for the UAE was front-of-pack labelling, said Dr Douglas Bettcher, the head of non-communicable diseases at the World Health Organisation.
“Front-of-pack labelling comes in different forms but is a mechanism of clarifying with clear signs what is unhealthy and not healthy because the average consumer has a hard time understanding and differentiating between the quality of different foods,” he said.
Countries such as France, Chile and most recently the UK have adopted the method to deter people from buying food that is high in fat and sugar. The success of the tactic has yet to be measured.
“We don’t know yet the percentages of reduction of obesity but it helps consumers clarify more easily the types of food they are consuming – which foods are high in sugar, fat and salt,” Dr Bettcher said.
A tax on energy and sugary drinks introduced by the UAE in October was praised by the visiting experts, who said more still needed to be done to address the country’s obesity problem.
An ambitious target to halt the rise of obesity in children and adults by 2013 was set by the WHO two years before, but trends appear to have gone in the opposite direction.
“We have been tracking global trends for obesity and overweight around the world and over the last four decades, we can see that the prevalence of obesity has almost tripled.
“So rather than halting the rise, we have a massive problem on our hands,” said Leanne Riley, from the WHO.
“A staggering 1.9 billion people around the world are either obese or overweight,” she said
Of those, 650 million adults are obese – about 13 per cent of all adults or more than 1 in 10 of those aged 18 or older.
She said the picture for children and adolescents was no better with 340 million children and adolescents between the age of five and 18 either overweight or obese. A further 41 million children under five are overweight or obese.
Of the 340 million, 121 million schoolchildren and adolescents are obese – meaning nearly one in five children and adolescents are either overweight or obese worldwide
The UAE fares even worse with the prevalence of those overweight or obese about double the global average at 35 per cent. About one in three children or adolescents in the UAE is either obese or overweight.
Two thirds of all adults in the UAE are obese or overweight, she said.
Between 200 and 300 bariatric surgeries are performed a year at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City with the youngest performed on a 14-year-old.
The operations are considered an option when individuals have excess weight ranging from between 43 and 45 kilograms.
Dr Abdelrahman Nimeri, head of the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, said that the number of bariatric surgeries between 2014 and 2016 had increased from 4,000 to 6,000.
“Obesity is becoming a real problem not just here in the UAE but worldwide and what we want is to start the dialogue and to change the way we think about obesity,” said Prof Ian Caterson, the president of the World Obesity Federation.
“We want to change the stigma surrounding obesity in many parts of the world and we want to get obesity into the UN high-level meetings.
“We want to get obesity into universal healthcare systems so it becomes an issue which we prevent, which we manage and which we care for people of all ages. The Department of Health is interested, World Obesity is interested, but we need to work together.”
UAE’s prevalence of those people who are overweight or obese is double the global average at 35 per cent