Dr/Tawfik Khoja said on Sunday (March 15
2015) that the eastern girls have made highest obesity rates, after studies
conducted in the eastern region.
Where the General Director of the Executive
Office of the Council of Ministers of Health of the Gulf Cooperation Council,
Tawfiq Khoja revealed in a statement to « Sharq » that obesity of Saudi women
in the eastern region seemed obvious, a study was conducted in 2010 on more
than seven thousand children between the ages of «2-18» years, and the overall
rate of overweight among them was 19 per cent and 23.3 per cent of obesity, and
between the age group of the fourteenth to the eighteenth was more than 85 per
cent.
While obesity among females reached up to 35.6
per cent, and males was 19.2 per cent, while it was less severe situation in
the previous study in 2002 which was conducted on more than 12 thousand
children and a child, where the overall percentage of obesity among males was
10.7 percent, and among females was 12.7 percent.
Premature deaths
Khoja pointed out that the fight against
non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and
respiratory diseases is one of major global health challenges and one of the
economic burden pressure on the health systems in the world, as they are the
most important causes of premature death and disability as they represent more
than 60 percent of the causes of death, and accounts for 47 percent of the
global burden of patients at the present time, it is expected that this
percentage will increase in 2020 to 73 percent.
From the perspective of Epidemiology, that is
attributed to the increasing aging population in the developing world and the
steady increase in the transition to the urban community and the ensuing social
and economic impact which is mostly due to related behavioral factors such as
unhealthy food approach and physical inactivity, which leads to obesity, which
represents one of the most important risks leading to vascular heart disease,
diabetes, hypertension and some types of tumors.
Nutritional behaviors
Khoja added that: "unhealthy food
behaviors, such as increasing the salt, sugar and fat in food, especially
hydrogenated ones that appear more in processed foods and fast foods as well as
soft drinks, they are the most important causes of obesity in addition to
inactivity and lack of sports and healthy activity and mobile phone and
multiple means of communication addiction. Recent studies have confirmed
increasing the growth rates of inactivity and lack of physical activity in most
of the GCC states, and thus a massive increase in obesity rates, especially
among women.
Khoja pointed to a recent report by the Maknezi
Institute, which revealed that the anti-obesity costs have risen to two
trillion dollars a year, and stressed that the 2.1 billion people, or about 30
per cent of the world's population is overweight, and accounted for about 15
percent of health care costs in advanced economies.
He indicated that studies have shown the
prevalence of diabetes mellitus is endemic made him a health risk at the
national level and the Gulf community will be affected by diabetes at high
rates, and this was reflected clearly in the presence of five of the GCC
countries in the list of top ten countries in the world in the incidence of
diabetes, according to the World Federation of Diabetes «IDF »in 2011.
He clarified that cardiovascular disease, which
represents more than one-third of the causes of death, is not the best off. As
the Gulf Survey of Family Health results alerted for more than fifteen years to
confirm the diagnosis of this disease in persons with ages over forty years at
rates ranging between 20 to 45 percent.
For his part, the public relations manager in
the education of the Eastern Region Saed Albahs, assured that school nurses
noticed the cases of obesity among girls, and they have been giving the
students the proper health awareness about the body mass measurement and the
students began to respond, and already their body mass index has decreased, and
their teachers has praised this improvement..
He added that there is a program called «my
health in my diet» which is applied to the lower classes, to teach them the way
to make healthy food choices.