The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director of Nutrition in Rome, Dr Anna Lartey, says obesity among children is on the increase across the globe.
She said the worrying aspect of the situation was that many of those cases were from the developing world.
Hitherto, she said the developing world was rather noted for children with stunted growth.
Dr Lartey, who made this known at the sixth Africa Nutritional Epidemiology Conference (ANEC VI) in Accra, said obesity, which was more prevalent in urban settings, had a resultant effect of an increase in non-communicable diseases such as diabetes in children, heart diseases and stroke among children or later in life.
The conference, which was on the theme: �Nutrition and food security in Africa: New challenges and opportunities for sustainable development�, brought together nutritional scientists from across the world, as well as stakeholders.
Causes
Obesity in children, which, she said, was a current development, was caused by intake of high sugary foods and unhealthy diets.
She said the Third World was suffering a double burden of child obesity and stunted growth and stressed the need for the situation to be addressed before it got out of hand.
Dr Lartey, who is also the President of the International Union of Nutritional Scientists (IUNS), said statistics on the number of children suffering from obesity were difficult to come by, but on stunted growth, she said 28 per cent or 160 million children below the age of five across the world were stunted.
Overweight/obesity
The prevalence of overweight and obesity is rapidly rising, even in low and middle-income countries. Today, about 1.4 billion people, including a high number of children are overweight, with 500 million of them being obese.
The global prevalence of combined overweight and obesity, Dr Lartey said, had risen in all regions, with prevalence among adults increasing from 24 per cent to 34 per cent between 1980 and 2008.
The prevalence of obesity had increased even faster, doubling from six per cent to 12 per cent, she added.
Dr Lartey termed obesity as a health condition suffered by the affluent in society, especially in urban settings, adding that undernutrition was more severe in rural areas.
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