How would you feel?

If I told you that somewhere around the world infants are getting injected with a vile poison. A venom that doesn’t kill immediately rather it slowly cripples the child, taking away his/her quality of life and decreases his/her life expectancy by 15 years. How would you feel? Would you burst in tears? Punch a wall and recite every swear word in the dictionary? Or even make it your life’s goal to put an end to this monstrosity? Well, I want you to remember those feelings very well while reading the rest of this vlog, because the story I told might not be perfectly real but it holds a lot of truth.

Children & Obesity

More than 19% of children suffer from obesity worldwide which adds up to a frightening 14.4 million children. Four out of five of those children will remain obese as adults which will result in them losing 15-20 years of life on average. Are you starting to get the analogy and to connect the dots? Children aren’t getting injected with crippling poison, but they are getting exposed to crippling quantities of food with poison like nutritional values. I got interested in the subject of obesity in children after plotting 2 maps using the WDIData. One map for the obesity rates in children worldwide, and the other for the diabetes rates worldwide. What I found was shocking. I found that most countries with higher than average obesity rates in children has higher diabetes rates (as can be seen in the plot below).

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After doing some research (because of my findings), I concluded that an obese child is a diabetic adult in the making. Obese children face four times the risk of developing type 2 diabetes which is a leading cause of death worldwide (9th). Why isn’t obesity in children treated like the atrocity it is? I believe that feeding children unhealthy foods is akin to giving them a cigarette and telling them to light up.

What should we do?

After some research, I found that the most prominent solution and the one most sworn by is awareness. Awareness for the children at schools about healthy lifestyle and the importance of fitness, and more importantly awareness for the parents regarding obesity and its repercussions, healthy living, and