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Promoting healthy weight - key facts

• Obesity is a serious health problem and difficult to reverse. Obese children and adolescents are more likely to become obese adults. These facts means that prevention is highly desirable.
• Overweight/obesity increase a person's risk for Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, abnormal blood fat (e.g. cholesterol) levels, some cancers, high blood uric acid levels, breathlessness, sleep apnoea, impaired fertility, osteoarthritis of the knees and lower back pain. It also reduces quality of life with respect to social interaction, anxiety, depression and mental wellbeing.
• Over the last 20 years, rates of obesity have increased markedly in many countries, leading some researchers to speak of overweight and obesity as a "pandemic."
• The prevalence of obesity doubled in Australian adults and tripled in Australian children in the ten years to 1995.
• Only a third of the adult population in NSW are of healthy body weight.
• Around half of women and two-thirds of men per cent of men in NSW were overweight or obese in 1995.
• Recent research has shown that about one in five NSW school children aged 7 to 15 years are overweight or obese.
• Overweight and obesity contributed over four per cent to the total burden of illness and disability in Australia in 1996.
• Estimates for 1995/6 suggest that the annual direct costs of obesity in Australia are between $680 - $1239 million.
• Overweight and obesity is generally caused by an imbalance between the energy eaten as food and energy burnt up through physical activity.
• While some people have a family tendency to gain weight, genetic factors cannot explain the dramatic increases in rates of overweight and obesity in recent years.
• There are indications that approximately 20 to 25 per cent of children and adolescents are insufficiently active for health benefit, including the prevention of overweight.
• Overweight and obesity is related to a host of technological, social, economic and environmental changes including increases in sedentary activities (e.g. TV, video viewing), use of the motor car for transport, decreases in physical activity and increases in consumption of high energy foods (e.g. convenience foods, fast foods, increased portion sizes in commercial food outlets.)
• Underweight is a problem for a very small percentage of people in NSW.