Almost one in three Irish 11 year olds is overweight

Almost one in three 11 year olds in Ireland is overweight.

This puts the country in third place in a European league table for overweight prevalence, research published this morning shows.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Office for Europe report, published to coincide with the opening health event of the Greek presidency of the EU, is based on individual profiles of 36 countries.

Greece has the highest prevalence of overweight 11-year-old boys and girls at 33 per cent, followed by Portugal at 32 per cent.

Ireland and Spain are joint third with a prevalence of 30 per cent.

Switzerland and the Netherlands had the lowest prevalence rates at 11 and 13 per cent respectively.

Scandinavian countries and France have managed to stabilise overweight rates, the report suggests.

"Our perception of what is normal has shifted; being overweight is now more common than unusual," the WHO regional director for Europe, Zsuzsanna Jakab, said.

New norm
"We must not let another generation grow up with obesity as the new norm."

According to the WHO, countries that have stabilised rates of obesity and overweight have implemented policies using a whole-of-government approach in line with Health 2020 , the WHO policy framework for health.

The range of actions includes the promotion of vegetable and fruit consumption in school, along with school lunch initiatives, taxes on foods to reduce intake, tighter controls of advertising, and action to promote physical activity, especially among children.

Today’s figures are based on the 2009/2010 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study which, in the Republic, was carried out by researchers from the department of health promotion at NUI Galway.

Some 16,000 children from 256 schools participated in the 2010 survey here.

Once a day
It reported that a fifth of Irish children said they ate fruit more than once a day and half said they exercised four or more times per week.

However, the NUIG researchers criticised a 2012 WHO report that placed Irish 11-year-old girls in third place in an obesity league table, on the basis that the survey here does not measure participants’ individual height and weight.