Gov’t sets 2019 goal to reduce obesity

Next year is the date the Ministry of Health has set to achieve a reduction in childhood obesity with a target of five per cent.

This was revealed by the Acting Senior Medical Officer, Dr. Ingrid Cumberbatch who delivered a presentation on ‘Barbados – Childhood Obesity Prevention Programme’ at the Ministry of Social Care recently.

She said that in order to achieve this target there are a number of objectives that they would be focusing on, including that mothers are only breastfeeding their children up to six months.

Echoing comments made by Paediatrician, Professor Anne St. John, she stated that some mothers tend to feed their children other foods, and unhealthy ones at that and this is a practice that they would like to see end.

“So what was the aim of this? We wanted to reverse the trends in obesity by 2019 and the target would be to reverse the upwards trends in obesity by five per cent by 2019. The objectives were to increase exclusive breastfeeding at six months by 20 per cent by 2019. And I think that this breastfeeding objective should stress that up to six months, you should be breastfeeding only,” she pointed out.

The Acting Senior Medical Officer said that more mature ladies should advise younger ones that this is the way that you should go and mothers should not engage in feeding babies younger than six months any other food. It was further noted that, for those mothers who have questions, there is hotline they can call.

She stated that another objective is to make sure that these youngsters are engaging in physical activity, which currently is an issue as many of them are not getting enough exercise. In fact, many of them would rather sit in front of the computer or television and this practice seems to be more common among the young ladies than the young men.

“We would like to reduce prevalence of low physical activity in adolescents by 30 per cent. Again, Professor St. John would have told you about the schools, you would have seen the statistics, the children are not getting physical activity, they are more into the computers, the electronics, where they are sitting and it is worse in the girls than in the boys,” she further lamented.

With respect to this, Dr. Cumberbatch said that she would like to send out advice to educators and schools that they need to encourage more physical activity in their respective schools by not only including it as a part of their regular curriculum, but also as an extracurricular activity.

“So we need to put more emphasis on physical activity – mandatory physical activity in the schools. So you need to encourage children to exercise (and) as educators, you need to put more emphasis on physical activity, both in the main curriculum of the school, but also the extracurricular activity should be more sustainable,” it was further noted.