Preventing Obesity In The Developing World

Main Category: Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness
Also Included In: Nutrition / Diet;  Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 24 Jul 2007 - 1:00 PDT

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Developing countries in Asia aiming to head-off a western-style obesity crisis are using Queensland University of Technology's (QUT) obesity prevention expertise to help them do it.

Although under-nutrition in Asia's developing countries is the predominant diet-related problem, Queensland University of Technology's Professor Andrew Hills from the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) said childhood overweight and obesity was becoming a serious problem.

"Childhood obesity is a growing concern in Asia as a result of the nutrition transition and more people adopting the Western lifestyle," Professor Hills said.

QUT is involved in a large regional Technical Cooperation program to up-skill health workers in seven Asian countries in methods to quantify size and shape and to measure body composition of young people as a basis for designing interventions appropriate for children in the region.

It is one of a number of international initiatives executed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that QUT obesity prevention experts are assisting with.

"QUT will assist in the training necessary for the consistent measurement of size, shape, body composition and energy expenditure before designing anti-obesity interventions,'' Professor Hills said.

"Without ethnic-specific cut-points, measurements such as the Body Mass Index (BMI) and waist circumference may not be suitable for certain ethnic groups who are genetically smaller or of finer build.

"The health risks associated with overweight and obesity kick in for many Asian people at a lower BMI because of smaller body size."

Professor Hills said that being able to assess body composition accurately using stable isotope techniques available at QUT was fundamental to the monitoring of change as a function of obesity interventions and that body weight and BMI provided only a crude indication of body composition status.

He said these common measurements could therefore be misleading and gave only a rough guide to health status.

"It is important to use more accurate measures to avoid misclassifying people who may have the same body weight but have different levels of body fat and therefore different risk levels," Professor Hills said.

"Fundamentally, the distribution of body fat plays an important role in determining health risk. A greater distribution of fat in the abdominal area carries greater metabolic risk than when it is distributed more uniformly around the body."

As part of the capacity-building efforts of the IAEA in the developing world, Professor Hills was recently invited to participate as a member of a group of experts who delivered the Nobel Peace Prize Fund Nutrition School to delegates from 30 African nations in Uganda.

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

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