Childhood Obesity on the Rise in Spain as Adherence to Med Diet Falls

Save the Children, an inter­na­tional non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion, has issued a stark warn­ing about the future of the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle, cit­ing socioe­co­nomic inequal­ity and the Covid-19 pan­demic as sig­nif­i­cant dri­ving fac­tors in its decline.

“Mediterranean coun­tries have gone from hav­ing one of the health­i­est diets in the world to one where sweets, fast food and sug­ary drinks have dis­placed fruit, veg­eta­bles, olive oil and fish,” accord­ing to a 64-page report pub­lished last month.

The report’s authors cal­cu­lated that Spain now has one of the high­est child­hood obe­sity rates in Europe, sur­passed only by Cyprus, with almost 20 per­cent of its seven to eight-year-olds being clin­i­cally obese. This is con­sid­er­ably higher than the European aver­age of approx­i­mately 12.5 per­cent.

As a major part of its research, the orga­ni­za­tion car­ried out a new sur­vey using the National Health Survey of Spain (ENSE) 2017 cri­te­ria to deter­mine the scope of the impact of the Covid-19 pan­demic in this area.

Their analy­sis of the results indi­cated that before the pan­demic, lev­els of excess weight in Spanish chil­dren had slowly begun to decline in line with those of other Mediterranean coun­tries such as Greece and Portugal.

However, the pan­demic, with its con­se­quent move­ment restric­tions in con­junc­tion with the clo­sure of schools and sports facil­i­ties, saw that pos­i­tive trend reverse with a 0.9 per­cent increase in excess weight among under-18s by September 2021.

The authors warned that this increase may even be an under­es­ti­ma­tion, given that pan­demic restric­tions also saw a dra­matic reduc­tion in the num­ber of rou­tine pedi­atric vis­its at which more detailed and accu­rate infor­ma­tion is recorded.

While the pan­demic has clearly impacted the activ­ity, diet and finances of the pop­u­la­tion at large, it accounts for only an iso­lated part of the prob­lem.

The lifestyle and dietary habits of the Mediterranean olive-grow­ing regions have seen hugely sig­nif­i­cant changes in the decades fol­low­ing World War II, with the intro­duc­tion of fast food, the con­sump­tion of large quan­ti­ties of red meats and other harm­ful habits.

In recent years, the trend has accel­er­ated. For exam­ple, the aver­age con­sump­tion of fish and seafood in Spain decreased by approx­i­mately 30 per­cent between 2000 and 2019. The grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of car­bon­ated bev­er­ages has also altered the population’s nutri­tional pro­file.

According to the 2019 ANIBES study, the aver­age energy con­sump­tion of the Spanish pop­u­la­tion was 1,810 kilo­calo­ries per diem, of which 12 per­cent was deliv­ered by bev­er­ages.

However, other pop­u­la­tion groups from France and Italy showed a lower pro­por­tion of energy pro­vided by bev­er­ages (8 per­cent and 6 per­cent, respec­tively). Additionally, a sig­nif­i­cant shift among adults toward higher beer con­sump­tion instead of the more tra­di­tional red wine has taken place.

Catalina Perazzo, Save the Children’s direc­tor of social and polit­i­cal advo­cacy, said that ​“chil­dren in Sweden are [now] the clos­est to eat­ing a Mediterranean diet in Europe.”

While this phe­nom­e­non is wide­spread, it is espe­cially preva­lent among lower-income house­holds. The 2017 ENSE data revealed that the chil­dren of unskilled work­ers were three times more likely to suf­fer from obe­sity than those of par­ents in man­age­ment posi­tions.

This lat­est report pro­vided more sig­nif­i­cant insights into the root causes of this dis­par­ity by ana­lyz­ing diet qual­ity, phys­i­cal activ­ity, sleep and screen time.

The researchers found socioe­co­nomic sta­tus to be the most sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in all of these areas, most notably those related to phys­i­cal activ­ity.

More than 71 per­cent of high-income house­holds were reported to engage in phys­i­cal activ­ity or sports reg­u­larly com­pared to 41 per­cent of low-income house­holds.

Conversely, while 46 per­cent of chil­dren in low-income house­holds were reported to spend more than five hours a day in front of a screen, the data for high-income house­holds showed nearly 80 per­cent of chil­dren spend­ing less than one hour each day in this way.

A sim­i­lar rela­tion­ship was found in dietary habits, with 18 per­cent of chil­dren from low-income house­holds con­sum­ing con­fec­tionery daily, 5 per­cent con­sum­ing car­bon­ated bev­er­ages daily and 2 per­cent con­sum­ing fast food daily.

The cor­re­spond­ing fig­ures from high-income house­holds were 10 per­cent, 0 per­cent and 0 per­cent, respec­tively.

The authors con­cluded that ​“in house­holds with lower incomes, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of access­ing the food nec­es­sary for a bal­anced diet [and] pay­ing for extracur­ric­u­lar or non-seden­tary leisure activ­i­ties” are reduced.

As a result, they said urgent gov­ern­ment action is needed at the national and regional lev­els to reverse these trends and safe­guard chil­dren’s health and pros­per­ity through­out the coun­try.

• Save the Children