“Make the fight against childhood obesity a major national cause for the next five years”

Grandstand. While the whole world has just relayed the World Day against obesity on March 4, almost nothing on childhood obesity! The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks childhood obesity as one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st^and century and no longer hesitates to qualify it as“epidemic”, so dazzling is its progress on a global scale.

In France, among children aged 6 to 17 in 2015, the prevalence of overweight was estimated at 17% for this age group (“Corpulence des enfants et des jeunes en France métropolitaine en 2015. Esteban et al. evolution since 2006”, Weekly epidemiological bulletin2017, n^oh 13, pages 234-41, see PDF).

Unbearable injustice

Childhood obesity is unbearably unfair in many ways. It is directly correlated to socio-economic difficulties. Childhood obesity is a long-term determinant of health status leading to an increased risk of obesity, premature death and disability in adulthood.

The overweight child or adolescent is most often the object of teasing and harassment, a source of social exclusion. This can generate a drop in self-confidence, a high risk of behavioral problems, anxiety and depression, disinvestment in school or learning difficulties, sources of school failure.

These resentments are all the more marked among girls. Anxiety, rejection and lack of self-esteem can also be the cause of addictive behavior or eating disorders that contribute to the aggravation of obesity.

The main cause of childhood obesity is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. Clearly, we must eat better, good, quality and move more.

More stringent regulation

The time to warn about the dangers of junk food and ultra-processed foods is over and must give way to minimum obligations for the proper processing of agri-food products defining the levels of sugar, salt, fat, endocrine disruptor…

To improve the nutritional quality of food, the Nutri-score was set up based on the voluntary participation of manufacturers. But, in view of the encouraging but insufficient results, it is now necessary to work on more restrictive regulation.

Following the example of the Evin law, it is necessary to consider restricting advertising on certain fatty and sugary products and to establish recommendations concerning food marketing on television, audiovisual, on the Internet and during events against them. European regulations would also allow Member States to recommend all of these systems and to oversee their deployment.

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