What children eat has a greater influence than physical activity on their body weight, a Deakin University study has found.
The results of the study, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also offers a major breakthrough by providing a simple formula for predicting the effects on body weight of changes in diet or physical activity. This will be vital for assessing the potential of various programs to prevent obesity in children and adolescents.
Deakin researchers used data pooled from studies of more than 900 children aged 4-18 years around the world. They found that, even after they had accounted for differences in age, height and gender, there was still a large variation in their body weights and that three-quarters of this variation could be explained by the heavier children eating more.
“This suggests that it is overeating that is the major driver in the childhood obesity epidemic,” said Professor Boyd Swinburn professor of population health and head of Deakin University’s World Health Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention. “This fits with the last two national nutrition surveys which showed a 13 percent increase in energy intake in children over 10 years, mainly due to an increase in junk food consumption.”
Many countries, including Australia, are grappling with how to turn the tide on childhood obesity. Predicting which programs are likely to be most effective has proven problematic because until now it has not been possible to estimate the effects of changes in diet or physical activity on changes in body weight.