Preventing Childhood Obesity - Evidence Policy and Practice.pdf

Chapter 33
% of total
DALYs lost
2.5% on the horizontal axis. Guyana
and Haiti are the countries with a single burden of
undernutrition. For most of the other nations a
greater burden is caused by energy excess, indicating
that overweight has emerged as the dominant malnutrition
problem even in this young age group. 9,10
De Onis and Blossner 4 conclude that, “attention
should be paid to monitoring levels and trends of
overweight in children. This, however, should not be
done at the expense of decreasing international commitments
to alleviating undernutrition. ” Within the
same community or even within a given household,
the presence of both over - and undernutrition takes
on some interesting dimensions. Caballero 11 has scrutinized
the phenomenon of persons with high and low
body weights living in the same household; the findings
are summarized in Figure 33.3 . On a continuum
of gross national product, only the poorest countries
have a low rate of the intra - household dual burdens;
this is partly explained by the low prevalence of obesity
limiting the opportunity for association. However, as
incomes rise, one can observe the curious occurrence
of a mixture of the extremes of body composition
status existing within the same family unit.
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