A study led by a group of researchers at Baylor University revealed that market-gained nourishments other than traditional diet routine can prove to be a reason for obesity in children, whether they do physical activities or not.
"The importance of a poor diet versus low energy expenditure on the development of childhood obesity remains unclear," said Samuel Urlacher, assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, and lead author of the study.
"Using gold-standard measures of energy expenditure, we show that relatively lean, rural forager-horticulturalists children in the Amazon spend approximately the same total number of calories each day as their much fatter peri-urban counterparts and, notably, even the same number of calories each day as children living in the industrialized United States" he added.
"Variation in things like habitual physical activity and immune activity has no detectable impact on children's daily energy expenditure in our sample," he said.
The study of 'Childhood Daily Energy Expenditure Does Not Decrease with Market Integration and Is Not Related to Adiposity in Amazonia - the study is published in the Journal of Nutrition, the American Society for Nutrition's flagship journal, and was funded by the National Science Foundation.
"That initial result alone is exciting in confirming our prior finding of relative stability in children's daily energy expenditure across different lifestyles and environments," Urlacher said.
"It shows that Amazonian children who eat more high-calorie market foods -- but not those who spend fewer calories every day -- consistently have more body fat. Together, these findings support the view that change in diet is likely the dominant factor driving the global rise in childhood obesity, particularly in the context of rapid urbanisation and market integration in low- and middle-income countries," he added.
The global rate of overweight/obesity among school-age children and adolescents has increased from 4 per cent in 1975 to 18 per cent until 2016. According to the Non-communicable Diseases (NCD), Risk Factor a major global health crisis mostly happens to children who are overweight as they may have a shorter life expectancy and a greater lifetime risk of developing NCD, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
"While the most rapid rise in childhood overweight and obesity is now in rural areas and middle-income countries, few previous studies have measured, rather than simply estimated, children's energy expenditure in these settings to identify the cause of energy imbalance," Urlacher explained.
