Study reveals high obesity rate in SA kids

By Celeste Ganga
11 March 2008

A recent study has revealed that many of South African children are overweight, obese and are not doing enough physical activity. Kathy McQuaid of the Sports Science Institute says that obesity has been a growing problem for decades in South Africa.

“The reason for this (obesity) is a combination of ever decreasing physical activity levels and also eating incorrectly- too many fast foods and bigger portions. Probably in the past decade, it’s (obesity) becoming increasingly evident,” says McQuaid.

She says key findings showed that there were low inactivity levels particularly in girls ranging from ages 16 to 19. “The girls are the ones who struggle a lot more with being overweight. If we look at teen girls, 30% of them are overweight, whereas 10% of boys in that same age group are overweight.”

South Africa was given a C (in terms of the grading system) for obesity by the Medical Research Unit for Exercise Science and Sports at the University of Cape Town. McQuaid says that when looking at the grading system a lot of different factors are looked at.

“When we did our grading system, we compared it to global values. The C-grade means that the problem is far reaching and a lot of children don’t have access to coping with the problem and that there aren’t enough initiatives about obesity to address the issue,” says McQuaid.

McQuaid says that they will be developing more projects and programmes regarding obesity, the theme for 2008 is ‘finding solutions and closing the gap’.