New bid to tackle childhood obesity
Eleanor Truswell, who went down from a size 26 to a size 18 after attending the Nutrifit Kidz Club at the UEA. DAN GRIMMER
17 January 2007 14:20
Childhood obesity in Norfolk has become so bad that health bosses are drawing up a vital blueprint to tackle the problem.
With an estimated 15,700 children in Norfolk up to the age of 15 overweight and 5,700 officially obese, costing the region £40million a year in medical bills, it is now officially regarded as a “major threat” by health experts.
In order to combat the problem, a raft of measures have been drawn up.
This includes weighing as many as four out of five primary schoolchildren, targeting deprived areas of Norwich, creating more play areas, encouraging breast-feeding and handing out vouchers to families for free vegetables and fruit.
Last year saw trials conducted in Norfolk schools to weigh more than 3,000 youngsters aged 10 and 11.
But by the end of 2007 Norfolk Primary Care Trust will be expected to have weighed 80 per cent of primary school children in reception year, about 5,800 children aged four and five, and 80 per cent of year six, roughly 7,000 children aged 10 and 11.
The ambitious targets will be set at a meeting of the East of England Strategic Health Authority (SHA) - the NHS body which has overall responsibility for health in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex - tomorrow .
Dr Anne McConville, consultant in public health at the SHA warned if current trends continue then by 2010, 17 per cent of boys and 19 per cent of girls aged two to 10 would be obese by 2010 - almost one million children.
She said: “Childhood obesity is a major threat to public health, with the prospect of a generation with a lower life expectancy than that of their parents.
“It would also lead to significant costs to the NHS and the economy as a whole if the obesity continues into adulthood.
“Effective action requires a comprehensive and co-ordinated series of interventions delivered by the NHS and partners to inform and support parents and children, and to create supportive environments for behaviour change.”
As well as weighing and measuring thousands of children to collect comparable data, other measures health bosses want to see introduced to tackle the obesity problem gripping the county are:
<LI type=square>Giving vouchers to low income families with more than five children, which can be exchanged for fruit and vegetables as well as milk and formula.
<LI type=square>Targeting deprived areas - such as Yarmouth and wards in Norwich such as Mile Cross, Mancroft and Catton Grove - to establish whether there is a link between deprivation and obesity.
<LI type=square>Encouraging breast feeding as studies have shown 4.5 per cent of babies who were bottle-fed were obese by the time they were five or six-years-old. Just 2.8 per cent of children given breast milk from birth were obese at the same ages.
<LI type=square>Training hospital staff to offer advice to overweight or obese patients.
<LI type=square>Set up more community weight loss programmes, possibly including children's weight loss camps.
<LI type=square>Working with councils to create more play areas and safe routes for children to walk to school.
<LI type=square>Encouraging nurseries to do more physical activities with children, rather than having children sitting around.
<LI type=square>Signing up more schools to the Healthy Schools standard, which means schools promote physical and emotional health by providing accessible and relevant information to pupils.
Eleanor Truswell, 15, is an example of how the problem can be tackled. With the aid of the NutriFit Kidz club based at the University of East Anglia Sports Park she went down from a size 26 to a size 18 by light exercise, healthy eating and medication, which controls her high insulin levels.
Her mother Sarah, 38, of Motum Road in Earlham, said today: “I would support anything they are doing to tackle it. I think it is a very good thing that they are going to weigh children at an earlier age because I often wonder if they might have picked up that Eleanor had a condition if they had tested her at that age.
“I had to watch her getting bigger and bigger and that might have been avoided if they had spotted it when she was a bit younger.
“Until you go through it you do not realise what it was like. Eleanor was being bullied because she was bigger than the other children and then she was hiding food from me and eating it to make herself feel better. It was a vicious circle.
“I am really glad that these problems are being taken seriously now.”
A total of 3,319 year 6 children in Norfolk had their height and weight measured last summer to calculate their body mass index. Of those, 15.4 per cent fell into the category of being obese.
The current national prevalence of obesity in that age range is 18 per cent and increasing by approximately one per cent each year.
Dr John Battersby, Norfolk PCT's director of public health, said: “It would be wrong to believe because we are below the national average, we have nothing to do.
“Just being overweight can mean a slight risk of health problems. Being obese means there is a significantly increased risk of problems, both now and in later life.
“Before the survey was conducted, we had no way of knowing whether the available data was accurate or not,” he continued,
“Now we have access to real information that gives us a clearer direction for our work, initially in halting the 1 per cent upward annual trend and then starting to reduce it.”
This summer will also see the start of a £400,000 study by city scientists to look at the problem. The University of East Anglia has won funding through the Medical Research Council for vital research to look at diet and physical activity as well as weight and height to get a broader view of factors contributing to escalating rates of child obesity.
In October last year Norwich was named one of the most unhealthy places to live in the country in a Department of Health report.
Childhood Obesity