What is going on with the kids? (When statistics speak louder than words)
08/07/2024
My last post rang the alarm bell on the disturbing rise in young people diagnosed with T2 diabetes in recent years. This is Part II shining the spotlight on childhood obesity and overweight.
According the World Health Organisation,
➡ in 1975 there were 11 million obese children and adolescents.
➡ Fast forward to 2022 and that number goes up to 160 million.
Put another way, for every obese kid in 1975, there are about 15 in 2022!
Ok, maybe 1975 is a long way back. Let’s take 1990, which a lot of us can remember much better.
➡ 31 million obese kids and teens worldwide in 1990.
So:
A 3x increase from 1975 to 1990.
A 5x increase from 1990 to 2022.
A 15x increase from 1975 to 2022.
Not only are kids getting fatter, but they are getting fatter faster.
(Data from WHO : https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight and https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-new-threats-to-health)
If that does not scream, “Parents Wake Up!”, I don’t know what does.
No, actually I do. What screams out even louder is that these are just the figures for OBESITY (i.e. kids and teens which are seriously in the red zone). And obesity is just the tip of this particular metabolic iceberg.
The figures for OVERWEIGHT is what brings this much closer to home.
Are you ready? …
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1 in 5 kids in 2022.
20% of 5-19 yr olds worldwide. Up from just 8% in 1990.
We went from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5 overweight kids in the space of just 3 decades.
I don’t know about you but that feels quite “close to home” for me.
Overweight is becoming “normal” even among kids. (I am not even going to go there for adults - we are talking close to 1 in 2 🙊). But as we said before, “normal” does not equal “optimal”, nor “healthy”.
The problem with overweight and obesity is that once they are there they are very tricky to “undo”. We have billion$ industries trying to offer solutions to this very problem and how far did that get us?
It is much much much better to not get there in the first place.
A kid carrying extra weight in childhood and adolescence is almost certain to carry it into adulthood - and then things get even harder.
Many kids who are not overweight go on to become overweight adults. Why? In my humble opinion, a good part of the reason has got to do with the eating habits which they carry with them into adulthood. When life becomes more sedentary and metabolism slows, it catches up with them.
It's not the kids’ fault. Most of the time, it is not even the parents’ fault. The food environment we live in is very difficult to navigate, even for the best intentioned and health conscious of us.
Stay tuned for Part III where I will be sharing practical tips and suggestions on how to give your kids the best chance in this crazy food world.
And in the meantime, if you need a hand optimising how to feed the family, let's chat.
#childhoodobesity #kidshealth