Concerns raised over number of healthy children who are dieting

ONE in seven healthy children is on a diet, a University of Oxford study has found, amid concern about how body weight is discussed.

Data from 34,235 children in England showed that in 2016, the latest year for which diet statistics are available, 13.6 per cent of healthy children were trying to lose weight. In 1997, the first year the data were recorded, the figure was 5.3 per cent.

Experts said that while interest in losing weight was soaring, nothing was being done to help meet this demand, “creating a risk of unsupervised and potentially inappropriate weight-control behaviours”.

“The rise in weight-loss attempts among children with a healthy weight raises concerns and suggests greater attention is needed to target weightcontrol messages appropriately,” the study’s authors said.

While children of a healthy shape and size are increasingly trying to shed unnecessary pounds, the scientists say there has been a “significant increase over time” in the proportion of all children reporting weight loss attempts.

More than a quarter of under-18s are on diets, the data show, up from 21.4 per cent in 1997-98 to 26.4 per cent in 2015-16.

There was an increase, from 9 per cent to 39.3 per cent, in overweight children trying to diet, and from 32.9 per cent to 62.6 per cent for those who were obese.

Data showed that teenage girls were more than twice as likely to be trying to lose weight as their male peers, while there was no difference between the sexes for those under the age of 12.

Older children were more likely to want to lose weight than younger ones, as were those from Asian and lowincome families, the study found.

Writing in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, the experts said there was a marked increase in weight loss attempts among children from 2011-12 onwards.

This coincided with parents being given feedback on their child’s weight as part of the National Child Measurement Programme, which weighs and measures pupils when they are in reception and Year 6.

The latest data for England show that 14.4 per cent of children in reception classes were obese in 2020-21, up from 9.9 per cent in 2019-20.

Among Year 6 pupils, who are aged 10 and 11, obesity prevalence rose from 21 per cent in 2019-20 to 25.5 per cent in 2020-21.