Statistics on childhood obesity in Europe and in the world

Edited by Dr. Davide Sganzerla

According to the latest assessments of the International Obesity Task Force (May 2004), one in ten children in the world is overweight. There are about 155 million school-age children who are overweight and within these, about 30- 45 million are obese.
Figure 7 illustrates the percentages of overweight and obese school-age children in various regions of the world in the late 1990s.

In Europe, the average percentage of 5 to 17 year olds overweight is around 20%. The highest levels of overweight and obesity are observed in Southern European countries.
Recent studies have found, based on the IOTF criterion, that 36% of 9-year-old Italian children are overweight or obese (Perra, 2002); in Greece, the percentage of excess weight is 26% in boys and 19% in girls aged 6 to 17 (Krassas, 2001); in Spain, 27% of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. (Majem, 2001).

As illustrated in Figure 8, northern European countries (10-20%) tend to have lower incidence rates than southern countries (20-35%); for example, in 1998 about 20% of UK children were overweight or obese (Lobstein, 2003); in Sweden the percentage is 18% among 10-year-olds, while it is 13% among Finnish adolescents. (Kautiainen, 2002).
The reasons for these differences are unclear. Genetic factors are unlikely, because this trend can also be shown within a single country, such as Italy (see Figure 2). The child's family or family income can be two possible causes, but the economic downturn can also affect the percentage of obesity increasing. Croatia, in fact, suffered an economic recession in the nineties and had an increase in the percentage of excess weight in school-age children (Hrvatski, 1998), while the Czech Republic, economically damaged by the crisis in Russia, had an increase from 10 % to 12.5% in the period between 1991 and 1999. (Bláha, 2002).
However, despite the increasing trend across Europe and the economic recession that occurred with the fall of communism, the percentage of childhood obesity in Russia decreased from 15.6% to 9% between 1992 and 1998 (Wang, 2002).