What is it about?
Overweight and obesity is common among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and adults nationally, and it is a leading contributor to health gap. We found that most children in the Footprints in Time study had a healthy Body Mass Index. However, there was a rapid onset of overweight and obesity across the early childhood years. We found that nearly a third of children who had a healthy weight at baseline (when they were age 3-6 years) had become overweight or obese 3 years later (when they were age 6-9 years). What this means is that we need to promote healthy weight starting from the first years; that means working with families and communities to give children the best start in life.
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Why is it important?
We have a national commitment to improving the wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Obesity is a leading contributor to the gap in health. Our findings demonstrate the importance of focusing on the early childhood years and supporting families and communities, in order to enable all children to grow up strong.
Perspectives
Improving the weight status of Indigenous children will require promoting the wellbeing of families and communities, as well as improving the local food environment so that children and families are able to make healthy choices. Taken together with the existing international evidence, this paper provides some evidence that reducing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and other “junk” foods from an early age could have a beneficial impact on the weight status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. However, this is just one part of the solution. We know that families across Australia – in remote, regional, and urban settings – face barriers to accessing healthy foods. Therefore, efforts to reduce “junk food” consumption need to occur alongside efforts to increase the affordability, availability, and acceptability of healthy foods. Policymakers should work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and service providers to develop and implement local and national programs and policies.
Katherine A Thurber
Australian National University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Body mass index trajectories of Indigenous Australian children and relation to screen time, diet, and demographic factors, Obesity, March 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/oby.21783.
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