•  
•  
  • How and why
  • Obesity: our Struggle
  • Our philosophy
  • Pressbook
  • Goldbook
  •  
•  
  • Coaching
  • Medical support
  • Psychological support
  • Physical support
  • Nutritional support
  •  
•  
•  
•  

 

> Childhood

> Adolescence
The Fragility Stage

> Obesity In France

> Obesity In the World

> Obesity In Tunisia

> Scientific Findings

 

■ The Obesity in Tunisia :

In Tunisia, a North African emergent country, obesity has preoccupied the people in charge of health, malnutrition, and the deficiency diseases for over thirty years. Thirty years ago, the nutritional investigations did not even evoke the obesity issue. Today, there are no investigations of plethoric diseases which do not exceed these worrying statistics: more than the quarter of the female population and 35% of the male population are victims of obesity.

At the recent conference of the Tunisian Company of Endocrinology, Professor Khemaïs Nagati, more known as the international chairman of diabetes, made a sad epidemiologic assessment of an evil which is not any more purely aesthetic.
In the past, Tunisian people seldom had top modal-like bodies, apart from the majority of girls who gain some weight right after the delivery of their first babies, which was considered as a sign of prosperity.
In an article, published on Wednesday November 28, 2007 in the Time newspaper, we can read that: “obesity, which is a fat excess whose effects are harmful for health, concerns 15% of the Tunisian population. 40% of Tunisians live with an excess of weight.”
A woman out of two and one man out of three has an excess of weight. Whether a girl or boy, and at the age of 4, one out of ten Tunisians is concerned.
And at the age of seven, one out of five is concerned. The risks are great. More than two thirds of the obese patients have medical complications related to obesity.

In the adult population, the higher the body mass is, the more health risks will be encountered.
Prevention remains certainly the best way to slow down this pathology and to avoid its repetitions. This pathology is a real problem of public health and it is within this framework that the eight medical Day Néapolis is organized on obesity in Hammamet by the medical association Néapolis and the regional management of public health of Nabeul.

According to Doctor Asma Bouaziz El Abed (head of the paediatrics department at the regional hospital of Nabeul), “Obesity has became an important concern of public health in the developed countries and also in the developing ones because of its increasingly high rate and of the important risks for an obese child to remain so at the adulthood stage.
Obesity is a multifactorial disease. It concerns 12 to 13% of our children. It is related to two factors: genetics and the environment. Children who are genetically predisposed to becoming obese will become so under the influence of the environmental factors. But children who are not genetically predisposed will not, even if faced with all the favourable conditions for a weight gain. The environmental factors appear since the pregnancy.
The foetal growth has an influence on becoming obese as far as children are concerned. Breast-feeding is a protective factor against obesity. On the other hand, artificially nursed children face high risks. A bad nutritional food hygiene also influences the child’s gain of weight. The complications are enormous. Obesity constitutes a delayed-action bomb because 80% of the children who are obese will remain so at the adulthood stage and will develop all the complications related to obesity, in particular the metabolic and cardiovascular ones which can cause death of the individual even at a very young age.”
The epidemic of obesity did not spare Tunisia where the rate of people suffering from diabetes is high and evolving, and closely related to the rate of obese people.