SA is failing to escape global trend to obesity

THE proportion of people who are overweight or obese has soared in the past three decades and not a single country has been able to reverse the trend, warns a global study to be published in the leading medical journal The Lancet on Thursday.

Picture: THINKSTOCK

South Africa is no exception and also holds the dubious distinction of having the highest proportion of people who are overweight or obese in sub-Saharan Africa.

Director of the noncommunicable diseases unit at the Medical Research Council and study co-author Andre Kengne said obesity posed risks for both individuals and society at large, as it raised the potential for a host of health problems including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and osteoarthritis. “The health system is going to be under increasing pressure to provide care for obesity-related problems .”

The proportion of women who are overweight or obese in South Africa increased from 58.7% in 1980 to 69.3% last year, while for men the figure increased from 36.1% to 38.8% over the same period.

The figures for children were particularly worrying, said Prof Kengne, as obese children were likely to grow into obese adults, and were increasingly experiencing diseases usually considered to be the problems of middle age.

In South Africa, the proportion of girls and young women under the age of 20 who were overweight or obese soared from 19.5% in 1980 to 26.3% last year, while the figures for boys and young men rose from 13.7% to 18.8%. The world has experienced a startling increase in rates of obesity and overweight in adults (28% rise ) and children (up 47%) in the past 33 years, with the number of overweight and obese people rising from 857-million in 1980 to 2.1-billion last year, according to the study.

Overweight is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of more than 25, while someone with a BMI over 30 is considered obese. BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight (in kilograms) by their height squared (in centimetres).

“Obesity is not a simple black and white issue; it’s not about taking personal responsibility or having a nanny state,” Wits professor of public health Karen Hofman said. “We need a mixture of government intervention and changes in habits. It’s extremely difficult to change habits in the face of relentless marketing.

“Many companies (selling unhealthy food) have spent millions of dollars on understanding consumers in ways that public health experts just haven’t .”

But there were promising interventions in many countries that had begun to have an effect on the food choices people were making. Prof Hofman cited rules in Thailand that require food labels to be on the front of packets and a decision by UK retailer Tesco to stop stocking sweets and snacks at its check-out aisles.

Derek Yach, the director of the US-based think-tank the Vitality Institute said some developed countries might soon see their rates of obesity level off, but this was not true for developing countries.