2023-10-16 03:20:00
Liljana is nine years old and she is hilarious. Of Serbian origin, she lives in Vienna with her family, who places great importance on food and sports. Liljana is delighted with her school, friends and teachers, but she has had bad luck. He doesn’t like her food. Everything is pre-cooked dishes, the fruit tastes like nothing and is always the same. The Physical Education teacher, a little old-fashioned, has them competing all day, encouraging the exclusion of less skilled students, and what she likes is to play basketball, jump and shoot baskets.
Tomasso is eight years old and is a studious child, he likes to read and learn. He lives on the outskirts of Milan, in a disadvantaged neighborhood, and his dream is to become an astronaut. There is an Italian astronaut right now at NASA! Tomasso knows that to achieve this he has to take great care of himself physically and mentally. However, on every corner in his neighborhood there is a junk food establishment. His family does not like him spending time on the street, they repeat to him the importance of studying to reach the stars. The only pleasant space to play in the neighborhood is a park attached to a sports center that is beyond two busy roads.
Xisca is 13 years old, lives in Palma de Mallorca and is a teenager full of energy who is going through a bad time. She doesn’t quite understand why she has to grow older and all the changes that puberty has brought her. Her family is always up and down and her friends tell her to stop fooling around and enjoy life. Xisca has the feeling that no one understands her, not even her handball teammates, and she has decided not to start the season with the team. She envies her cousin, who has a great family and is always posting photos of her fantastic life. At her school they have tennis and a swimming pool as extracurricular activities… Amazing… How her cousin lives!
The examples of Liljana, Tomasso and Xisca are realities of a European childhood and adolescence with a high risk of being overweight and obese.
The latest data from the WHO Europe, with 33 countries, and the European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI) showed that 29% of children aged seven to nine years were overweight and obese. Less than half (43%) of children aged six to nine years consumed fresh fruit daily and 7% consumed it less than once a week or never. Regarding physical activity, almost half (47%) of children spent less than two hours a week doing sports or dancing. In Spain, 39% of girls and 38% of boys aged 7 to 9 were overweight and obese. Together with Greece and Italy, Spain presents the most serious data in all of Europe, with prevalence of overweight and obesity close to 40%, while in countries like Denmark or the Czech Republic it is half.
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Given the worrying situation in Europe and especially in southern Europe, it is essential to recognize that obesity has a complex and multicausal origin in which biological, psychosocial, community and environmental factors intervene. Obesity leads to the early appearance of chronic diseases, causing a significant deterioration in quality of life and an increase in morbidity and premature mortality. Obesity therefore has a high negative impact on both the children, adolescents or adults affected and on the well-being of our populations.
The childhood obesity epidemic shows a very clear socioeconomic gradient in Europe and in a very clear and sustained way since the first studies, in Spain. The socioeconomic situation in which the child or adolescent grows up determines the possibility of presenting childhood obesity. Results from the PASOS 2019 study of the Gasol Foundation, which was carried out in a national and representative sample of all of Spain, show that children and adolescents who live in a more advantaged environment have a 72% less probability of presenting obesity and an 80% less probability for severe obesity.
In this sense, it is important to highlight the European Child Guarantee whose objective is to break the cycle of child poverty by guaranteeing access for all children and adolescents to six basic rights or services related to childhood obesity: child education and care, health care, adequate housing, education and extracurricular activities, less one healthy meal a day at school and a healthy diet.
According to the report STEPS 2022 of the Gasol Foundation, Healthy lifestyles have deteriorated compared to 2019, especially in the disadvantaged population. In just three years, the percentage of children and adolescents who report feeling sad, worried or unhappy has grown by 12.4%, reaching almost a third of this population. This increase rises to 17% for women and 16.5% in neighborhoods with lower income. Additionally, excessive screen use has increased overall, especially in disadvantaged families.
The relationship between food insecurity and obesity is a relevant question today. He study on childhood obesity and urban environment (SUECO for its acronym in English) shows that, in 2017, 18% of children between three and 12 years old in the city of Madrid lived in a home with some type of food insecurity and 8% with severe food insecurity, showing an increased risk of obesity of 15%. The risk was higher in girls than in boys. Other analyzes have shown that the urban environment is also unfair: of the boys and girls who live in environments with a higher concentration of unhealthy food stores in Madrid, 61% are classified as low social class, compared to 4% of upper social class (data not published to date).
With respect to the urban environment and the physical activity of children and adolescents, it is observed that the design of spaces intended for children and adolescents’ physical activity does not take into account the needs of their users. The vast majority of these spaces are sports fields—generally soccer or basketball—and this does not necessarily respond to the interests of boys and girls, but rather to how the adult population designs physical activity, strongly conditioned by sports clubs. School playgrounds follow this same pattern, creating an unattractive space for children, especially girls.
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Children and adolescents spend an important part of their days at school, making it not only a place to learn, but also to eat, play and socialize. The European project School Food For Change (SF4C)in which we participate together with 43 organizations from 12 EU countries, proposes to define and promote what it means to eat healthy and sustainable in educational centers, while addressing food education at various levels including families, teachers , kitchen professionals, catering supply companies and public buyers at the city level.
Spain has a route plan in which institutional, scientific and social agents participate. From the field of European research we continue to provide the best possible evidence. For example, this November we started a five-year, 10.5 million euro budget obesity prevention project, called OBCT, in which we collaborate and which includes a look at inequalities and epidemiological methods to understand the risk of obesity during the entire course of life.
From the central administration, in the summer of 2022 the National Strategic Plan for the Reduction of Childhood Obesity: In Plan Biena package of 200 measures aimed at ensuring that the family, educational, health, leisure and sports, urban-towns and cities, digital and audiovisual environment are increasingly promoters of the health of the current and next generations of girls and boys. and adolescents.
Liljana, Tomasso and Xisca have a high risk of being overweight and obese given their contexts in today’s Europe. Girls and boys who deserve all the efforts, all the guarantees to live and grow in a healthy way, with equal opportunities and who can unfold their full potential. From a health and rights perspective we will be able to ensure the highest levels of health and well-being for all the people who live in Europe.
Manuel Franco is a professor and researcher in Epidemiology and Public Health at the universities of Alcalá, Spain and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, USA. His research projects focus on Urban Health and Social Epidemiology.
Santi Gómez is director of programs and research at the Gasol Foundation. He is a psychologist, master in community health and well-being, master in public health and with a doctoral thesis focused on the analysis of the prevalence, determinants and preventive interventions of childhood obesity.
Paula Berruezo is technical coordinator of research and programs at the Gasol Foundation. She is a dietician-nutritionist, Master in physical activity and health and doctoral student at the University of Alcalá de Henares.
Luis Cereijo has a degree in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences and a Doctor in Epidemiology and Public Health. He is a researcher at the University of Alcalá and RMIT University. His work focuses on inequalities in the practice of physical activity and its influence on health.
Content review by Laura Lorenzo, Head of Communication and Marketing at Gasol Foundation.
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