One-third of Canadian kids overweight: study

Almost a third of Canadian children are either overweight or obese, says a report from Statistics Canada that bases its figures on the World Health Organization method of determining ideal weights for youth around the globe.

Using data from the 2009-2011 Canadian Health Measures Survey, the federal agency says 31.5 per cent of children aged five to 17 — or an estimated 1.6 million individuals — are overweight or obese.

The percentage of kids who were overweight was similar for boys and girls across age groups.

But when it came to those deemed obese, more boys than girls fit the WHO definition, with 15.1 per cent of boys being obese compared to eight per cent of girls.

The gender gap appears to be particularly noticeable in the five-to-11 age group, with three times more boys considered obese (19.5 per cent) than girls (6.3 per cent).

The proportion of Canadian kids and teens who are overweight or obese has not changed much in the last few years — although experts say the level is at all-time high, and unacceptably so.

What has changed is the method for determining if a child or teen is carrying too many pounds and to what extent.

The traditional estimate of overweight and obese youth — 26 per cent — is primarily based on International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) criteria taken from BMI measurements.

Thursday’s report uses WHO’s more recently implemented weight status charts, which many medical associations now endorse.

“More people met the threshold based on those new guidelines, so it looks like there’s a jump up in the number of kids who are overweight or obese,” said Dr. Mark Tremblay, director of Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.

Tremblay, who was not involved in penning the federal report, said it’s unlikely the proportion of overweight and obese kids has suddenly escalated by five or six percentage points.

“No, it’s really just a measurement issue,” he said. However, he conceded “we may have been underestimating in the past using the IOTF method how many kids that was.”

No matter which of the two estimates is closest to reality, Tremblay said the proportion of children and adolescents who are packing too much body fat is far too high.

“The overweight and obesity increase is almost surely tied to a drifting in lifestyle behaviours” that favour sedentary pastimes such as sitting in front of the computer over physical activities like play and sports, he said Thursday.

“And those behaviours at some level represent a misuse or a disuse of our muscles, our heart, our lungs and so on. And so they atrophy or they degrade or manifest problems at an earlier age.”

Tremblay said there has been an acceleration in the age of onset of chronic diseases in young people who are inactive and saddled with extra weight.

Increasingly, doctors are seeing kids with risk factors for cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and mental health issues — “things we would not expect and in previous generations would not have observed,” he said.

“This is the concern, that to some degree, we’re mortgaging the health of this younger generation.”