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(CNN) - More than 250 million school-age children and adolescents will be classified as obese by 2030, which puts great pressure on health systems, a new report on childhood obesity warns.
There are currently 158 million obese children worldwide, according to the first Atlas of childhood obesity of the World Federation of Obesity (WOF), which calculated obesity risk scores in the next decade for 191 countries.
The report said that children in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are particularly at risk, as a result of rapidly changing lifestyles along with the increasing popularity and aggressive commercialization of junk food.
“There is a transition away from traditional diets and ways of doing things. People spend less energy, become more sedentary and adopt a Western-style diet high in sugar, oil, starch and fat, ”Dr. Tim Lobstein, director of policy at WOF and one of the authors, told CNN Of the report.
The report says that no country included in the atlas would reach a goal agreed at a World Health Organization (WHO) summit in 2013, which required that levels of childhood obesity should not be higher in 2025 than they were between 2010 and 2012. He added that four of the five countries he evaluated had less than 10% chance of doing so.
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Dr. Lobstein said he was surprised by the "extraordinary increase" in the number of obese children predicted by the report. As childhood obesity is closely associated with obesity in adulthood, it would represent a great burden on health systems given the link with chronic diseases such as diabetes, he warned.
“That is a giant leap. It will flood health systems, particularly in developing countries, ”he said.
In the United States, 26.3% of children ages 5 to 9 and 24.2% of children ages 10 to 19 would be obese by 2030, according to the report, which gives the country a probability of 17 % of meeting the WHO objective by 2025.
In absolute terms, the US is expected. have 17 million obese children by 2030, the largest number after China and India.
The Pacific islands such as the Cook Islands and Palau ranked prominently among the countries with the highest risk in the next decade. Lobstein said that, in addition to less active lifestyles, island nations depended more on food imports, which were often highly processed and with large amounts of sugar and fat.
Lobstein said that governments around the world were reluctant to face large food companies that carry weight in the status quo. He said initiatives such as taxes on sugar and soft drinks would have only a small impact, particularly because they were difficult to implement in low-income countries, where governments were more likely to be persuaded by commercial interests.
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He added that he thought that a younger generation would take a more activist stance towards obesity, as they have done towards climate change.
“Most people don't want to be overweight, but there shouldn't be a stigma against the individual. It is a social problem, not a private problem, ”he said.
Childhood Obesity
