ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will be among the top ten countries in the world with the ‘most obese children’ by 2030, a new report on childhood obesity warns.

According to the study, with an estimated 5,412,457 children in the country predicted to have obesity in the next ten years, Pakistan stands at ninth place on the World Obesity Index.

In Pakistan 10.8% of five to nine year olds and 7.4% of 10 to 19 year olds would be obese by 2030, the report said.

According to the study, more than 250 million school-aged children and adolescents will be classed as obese by 2030, there are currently 158 million obese children around the world, according to the World Obesity Federation (WOF) first Atlas of Childhood Obesity, which calculated a risk score for obesity in the coming decade for 191 countries, worldobesity.org reported.

The report said children in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America were particularly at risk, as a result of fast changing lifestyles along with the growing popularity and aggressive marketing of junk food.

China is expected to be the worst affected, with an estimated 61.9million obese five- to-19 year olds in just over a decade.

This is more than double the amount predicted for second-placed India, expected to have 27.4million obese children and teenagers in 2030.

The US is third with 16.9million, while the UK comes in 36th place, with an estimated 1.3million obese youngsters.

After China, India and the US, the top 10 is made up of Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa.

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Dr Tim Lobstein, director of policy at the WOF and one of the authors of the report, said that the ‘dramatic rise' in the numbers of children affected by obesity is being driven by emerging economies – in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Professor Donna Ryan, WOF president, added, ‘Obesity in childhood is closely associated with obesity in adulthood, and with more years living with obesity, both of which are linked to a high level of consequential disease. This means that without substantial interventions to prevent and to treat childhood obesity, the problem will overwhelm the health services of many countries.’

The report said that no country included in the atlas would meet a target agreed to at a World Health Organization summit in 2013, which mandated that levels of childhood obesity should be no higher in 2025 than they were between 2010 and 2012. It added that four out of five countries it assessed had a less than 10% chance of doing so.—APP