Trend Analysis of Children and Young Adults Fitness in Regards of High Obesity Rates in the UAE.

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Obesity is the preventable buildup of excessive body fat that usually impairs health. Cases of obesity are detected using the Body Mass Index (BMI) that compares an individual’s weight and height. Individuals with a BMI of more than 30 are referred to as obese (Boesten, Luijmes, van Hout, & Nienhuijs, 2015). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the prevalence of obesity has tripled since 1975. In 2016, over 1.9 billion people with 18 years or more were found to be overweight, with approximately 650 million of them being obese. 13 percents of all adults over the age of 18 were obese during the same period. Close to 41 million children were either obese or overweight in 2016 while around 340 million people between the ages of five and 19 were obese (“Obesity and overweight”, 2017). Surprisingly, most of the world’s population lives in regions with higher cases of obesity than underweight. [cmppp_restricted]

Despite the global rise in the prevalence of obesity, the United Arab Emirates is fairing quite poorly in comparison with other countries with about 47.5 percent of the population being overweight and another 13 percent are obese. In Abu Dhabi, about 15.1 percent of all children and adolescents in the school-going age bracket were obese in 2016 while the average adult in the country is considered to be overweight (Sulaiman et al., 2017).

The global rise in the prevalence rate of obesity has been attributed to energy imbalances that result from the shifts in the economic, social, and physical environments. Despite the ethnic and racial disparities in obesity, there is a link between parental situations and child obesity. Indeed, obesity rates are typically higher in urban households than in rural ones and among housewives than working mothers. Women are more prone to obesity than men. Moreover, people with higher educational attainment and salary levels had higher rates of obesity (Hassan, El-Masry, Farid, & Khalil, 2016).

References

Boesten, R. H. M., Luijmes, R. E., van Hout, G. C. M., & Nienhuijs, S. W. (2015). Social-demographic and behavioural characteristics of a morbid obese population seeking bariatric surgery. Journal of Obesity & Weight Loss Therapy, 5(6).

Hassan, N. E., El-Masry, S. A., Farid, T., & Khalil, A. (2016). Influence of Parental and Some Demographic Characteristics on Overweight/Obesity Status among a Sample of Egyptian Children. Open access Macedonian journal of medical sciences, 4(3), 342.

Obesity and overweight. (2017). World Health Organization. Retrieved 27 November 2017, from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/

Sulaiman, N., Elbadawi, S., Hussein, A., Abusnana, S., Madani, A., Mairghani, M., … & Shaw, J. (2017). Prevalence of overweight and obesity in United Arab Emirates Expatriates: the UAE National Diabetes and Lifestyle Study. Diabetology & metabolic syndrome, 9(1), 88.[/cmppp_restricted]