According to the Child Nutrition Surveillance System (COSI), the percentage of overweight and obese children aged 6 to 8 increased to 31.9% and 13.5% respectively in 2022, reversing a trend recorded in recent years.
Coordinated by the Dutor Ricardo Jorge National Institute of Health (INSA) as the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborative Center for Child Nutrition and Obesity, COSI aims to obtain comparable data across European countries and track childhood obesity every three years in a nationally representative sample of public schools 1st cycle of basic education.
“Between 2008 and 2019, there was a consistent reversal of overweight and childhood obesity in Portugal, but in 2022 this trend does not seem to have been confirmed, with an increase of 1.6 percentage points (from 11.9% to 13. 5%) in the prevalence of childhood obesity and 2.2 percentage points (29.7% to 31.9%) in the prevalence of overweight in children,” says COSI, which is part of the WHO Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative/Europe study .
The study, which assessed 6,205 children in the 2021/2022 school year, places Portugal on par with the European average of 29%, with one in three children being overweight.
The Azores region was the region with the highest prevalence of overweight in both 2019 (35.9%) and 2022 (43%), while the Algarve region was the region with the lowest prevalence of overweight in both rounds (21.8% in 2019). and 27.7% in 2022).
As in previous years, in 2021/2022 the prevalence of overweight (including obesity) was found to increase with age, with 35.3% of 8-year-olds being overweight compared to 6-year-olds (29 .8%), the report says. The study showed that boys are most often obese.
With regard to the prevalence of underweight, the study showed some variation, decreasing from 2008 to 2010 (from 1% to 0.7%), increasing from 2010 to 2013 (from 0.7% to 2.7%) and decreasing again in 2016, turning into 0.9%. In 2019, it increased to 1.3%, and in 2022 to 1.6%.
“The distribution of the underweight category in urban and rural areas is similar. However, across all categories of nutritional status, higher values were found in semi-urban areas (underweight 2.2%, overweight 34.3%, and obesity 17.0%),” highlights the study, which was publicly presented to INSA on Tuesday. .
Questions related to parents’ perceptions of their children’s nutritional status were included in the COSI Portugal study, and they were found to appear to underestimate it, perceiving a lower prevalence of overweight and obesity. On the contrary, they tend to overestimate the prevalence of underweight in children.
Regarding the nutritional status of caregivers, the study indicates that 13.6% of mothers were obese and 29% preobese, while fathers were 16.6% and 45.7%, respectively.
The COSI Portugal 2022 study also analyzed factors associated with the first year of life that are associated with childhood weight gain, such as maternal nutritional status, birth weight and breastfeeding.
The breastfeeding rate (90.1%) in 2022 was similar to 2019 (90.3%) and higher than in 2008 (84.9%), with the Azores being the region with the lowest breastfeeding rate ( 73.8%) and the highest in the Algarve (92.7%). %), the study says, noting that 41.8% of infants were breastfed for more than six months,
Nationwide, 90.1% of mothers of children reported having a full-term pregnancy (37 weeks or more of pregnancy) in 2022.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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