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Childhood obesity: A Shorty´s problem becoming big

Abstract:

obesity is a chronic disease with a complex epidemiological behaviour originated from the interaction between genetic and environmental factors, among which are the patterns of diet and daily caloric consumption, as well as the degree of physical activity. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), obesity is defined as an abnormal and excessive accumulation of body fat. For the diagnosis of this condition in children and adolescents, tables designed by the WHO define overweight as a BMI higher than the 85th percentile but lower than the 95th percentile, and obesity as those individuals with a BMI above of the 95th percentile for a specific age and sex. Overweight and childhood obesity is rising in many countries, and despite being a problem systematically studied for more than 40 years, it is still far from being solved. Contrary to generalised believing, the most significant impact in terms of prevalence is occurring in both poor and low-income countries. Thus, -in a global scope for 2018, the number of children with obesity under five years old was 38 million, of which 27.2 million lived in Asia and Africa. Currently, 5.6 million children are carriers of overweight or obesity in the Americas coexisting with a significant number of children with malnutrition as a part of the nutritional transition phenomenon. In Colombia, the latest national nutrition survey has reported 6.3% and an overall prevalence of “weight-excess” (Obesity + overweight) in children less than five years, 24.4% in schoolchildren and 17.9% in adolescents. On the other hand, in the North of Santander, studies on childhood obesity are both very scarce and with small sample sizes, reporting an overweight and obesity prevalence of 23% and 17% respectively, a landscape that should be a call of attention for conducting more controlled studies with an appropriate sampling frame.