FIFTY per cent of Cypriot children are obese, according to the health ministry, which on Monday launched its diet national guidelines for teenagers. This was the third set of diet guidelines issued by the ministry, the first targeting adults and the second dealing with children between 6 and 12; a fourth set is being prepared for the elderly.
Health minister Stavros Malas said the dietary guidelines were being promoted by the network of clinical dieticians working at state hospitals and through educational programmes aimed at making people aware of the importance of a healthy diet. As regards youngsters, Malas said that a film, aimed at teenagers, would be prepared promoting the benefits of exercise and good eating habits.
It is important that the ministry would also be encouraging teenagers to exercise, because lack of it, we suspect, is as big a contributory factor to obesity among children as a poor diet. Twenty, 30 or 40 years ago, children may still have had a bad diet, but they got a lot more exercise as part of their daily routine than they do today. Nowadays you rarely see children playing outdoors, a standard feature of every neighbourhood in the old days.
Today’s children have a sedentary life-style which can only be bad for them. They spend too much of their free time – when they are not attending afternoon private lessons – on the computer and the Playstation or watching television. They are driven everywhere by their parents, while state schools do not devote enough of the curriculum to physical exercise. With such a lifestyle, 50 per cent of children would probably be obese, even if they followed the government’s dietary guidelines.
Thirty years ago, there were no afternoon private lessons, most kids would cycle or walk to most places and spend their free time outdoors playing. Conditions, admittedly, have changed. The old style neighbourhoods with empty fields in which children could play have disappeared. Roads are so busy parents do not allow their children to cycle anywhere; they do not even let them walk. In short, exercise does not feature in the daily lives of the young, as it had done in the case of their parents.
This is why the health ministry, must also consider ways of encouraging parents to make physical activity a part of their kids’ daily routine and we do not mean forcing them to go jogging every day. It would help if there were more parks and playgrounds where children could play safely, more easily accessible cycle paths and so on.
Children need to exercise much more and the health ministry, in combination with its healthy eating initiative, must wage a big campaign against the indoor, sedentary lifestyle that has become the norm for most children.
