A Childhood Obesity Is A Risk !

As countries develop it is more than just their GDP that grows; it is also their waistlines. For India this growth could be more harmful than elsewhere as traditional factors clash with the new prevalence towards fashionable, imported food and drink.

The problem of Indian childhood obesity is particularly alarming with some estimates putting the growth from 2011-2016 as 16% to 29% amongst 5-16 year olds. The condition has severe consequences for children as it leads to the early onset of serious diseases normally associated with adulthood (high blood-pressure, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease) at a time when the body is ill-equipped to tackle. Indeed if the current trend continues the number of overweight or obese children across Asia could grow from 15 million today to 70 million by 2025. There are a number of key Indian factors behind this growth that can roughly be divided into internal and external forces.

The model that many economies strive towards is that demonstrated by the United States of America; famous for many things including, most relevantly, obesity. Although Indian levels are still far off those exhibited by the U.S., the lifestyle that is championed by the world’s largest consumer is certainly here to stay as demonstrated by two key market indicators; soft drinks and fast food. Soft drink sales within India have been growing around 30% per annum for the past three years and have been touted to continue at this rate for another four. Meanwhile the fast-food market is on course to double between 2013 and 2016 and, equally alarmingly, mothers are also moving away from the famed “old-fashioned” home cooking in favour of pre-packaged ready meals.

And then there are the factors unique to India. The key factors affecting childhood obesity are considered stress and lack of exercise. In a country as populous as India there is fierce competition to attend the highest educational institutions meaning children are placed under huge amounts of pressure from their parents to achieve success at school. Couple to this to the lack of playing facilities offered at many Indian schools, to let off some of this steam as well as exercise, it creates a dangerous combination where comfort eating is, unsurprisingly, often the result.

Furthermore, there has recently been a physiological link established between Indian genetics and weight gain; known as the “thrifty phenotype” hypothesis. This proposes that the relatively rapid change from food scarcity to food paucity has resulted in a metabolism ill-equipped to efficiently process the highly-calorific sustenance that has become common-place. Champions of this theory describe the Indian body type as smaller and flabbier than those found elsewhere after generations of constrained diets and thus resulting in higher likelihood of obesity linked diseases when exposed to a more affluent environment.

The factors and implications laid out above demonstrate that India could be worse at dealing with the change in household diets than other developing nations. It is surely a sign of its significance that this problem has reached the ears of Indian policy makers who are drafting legislation that will curb the TV advertising of foods rich in non-esterified fatty acids (fast foods)and sugar-rich drinks during the hours that children are exposed. There is also talk of imposing special taxes on such goods however, for the time being this is just talk. These are both promising signs but must be brought to fruition if the world’s fastest developing nation is to avoid a long-term health catastrophe emerging at the same remarkable rate.

-William Lewis

One billion people still defecate in public despite health risks: UN

GENEVA: One billion people worldwide still practise "open defecation" and they need to be told that this leads to the spread of fatal diseases, UN experts said on Thursday at the launch of a study on drinking water and sanitation. 

"'Excreta', 'faeces', 'poo', I could even say 'shit' maybe, this is the root cause of so many diseases," said Bruce Gordon, acting coordinator for sanitation and health at the World Health Organization. 

Societies that practice open defecation - putting them at risk from cholera, diarrhoea, dysentry, hepatitis A and typhoid - tend to have large income disparities and the world's highest numbers of deaths of children under 5 years old. 

Attempts to improve sanitation among the poorest have long focused on building latrines, but the United Nations says that money literally went down the toilet. Attitudes, not infrastructure, need to change, it said. 

"In all honesty the results have been abysmal," said Rolf Luyendijk, a statistician at the UN's children's fund Unicef. 

"There are so many latrines that have been abandoned, or were not used, or got used as storage sheds. We may think it's a good idea but if people are not convinced that it's a good idea to use a latrine, they have an extra room." 

Many countries have made great progress in tackling open defecation, with Vietnam and Bangladesh - where more than one in three people relieved themselves in the open in 1990 - virtually stamping out the practice entirely by 2012. 

The global number has fallen from 1.3 billion in 1990. But one billion people - 90 per cent of them living in rural areas - "continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes or in open water bodies, with no dignity or privacy", the UN study said. 

The practice is still increasing in 26 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria was the worst offender, with 39 million open defecators in 2012 compared to 23 million in 1990. 

India no.1 

Although the prevalence of open defecation is in decline, it is often common in fast-growing populations, so the total number of people doing it is not falling so fast, or is even rising. 

The country with the largest number of public defecators is India, which has 600 million. India's relatively "hands off" approach has long been at odds with the more successful strategy of neighbouring Bangladesh, which has put a big focus on fighting water-borne diseases since the 1970s, Luyendijk said. 

"The Indian government did provide tremendous amounts, billions of dollars, for sanitation for the poorest," he said. 

"But this was disbursed from the central level to the provinces and then all the provinces had their own mechanisms of implementing. And as their own data showed, those billions of dollars did not reach the poorest," added Luyendijk. 

India's government has now woken up to the need to change attitudes, he said, with a "Take the poo to the loo" campaign that aims to make open defecation unacceptable, helped by a catchy Youtube video. here 

"What is shocking in India is this picture of someone practising open defecation and in the other hand having a mobile phone," said Maria Neira, director of Public Health at the WHO. 

Making the practice unacceptable has worked in more than 80 countries, the UN says. The goal is to eliminate the practice entirely by 2025. Poverty is no excuse, the study said, noting the role of cultural differences. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 14 per cent of the population are open defecators. But where the head of the household is an Animist, the figure is twice as high, at 30 per cent. Among households headed by Jehovah's Witnesses, it is only 9 per cent.

Source : The Times of India