Obesity: Our Struggle
■ The Obesity in the World:
Obesity is regarded as an epidemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). There are 300 million overweight adults in the world, and most of them suffer from pathologies related to their weight. One the third of the overweight people lives in developing countries.
November 11, 2004 | Geneva -- It is estimated that obesity or overweight concerns worldwide more than 22 million children of less than five years, including more than 17 million children in developing countries.
As the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Federation of Diabetes (FID) indicated, each one of these children presents an increased risk of developing a type 2 diabetes (also called adult diabetes or diabetes of maturity).
The fight against child obesity is a very effective means to prevent diabetes in the future 
, explains Dr. Catherine Wales Camus, General Director of the non-transmissible diseases and mental health (WHO), just a few days before the World Diabetes Day on November 14, 2004.
Chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disorders, cancers and cerebrovascular accidents slow down the economic development. Whereas malnutrition continues to be very alarming, in particular in developing countries, governments are also confronted with the fact that many children all over the world took up bad food habits and do not have enough physical exercises.
It is estimated that worldwide 10% of the children at school age (between 5 and 17) are overweight or are obese, and the situation is getting worse.
In the United States for example, the rate of obese and overweight children and teenagers aged between 6 and 18 years old passed from 15% in the Seventies to more than 25% in the Nineties.
Such increases are not the developed countries prerogative. In China, we observed in a study that the rate of child overweight and obesity at school age in the urban areas passed from almost 8% in 1991 to more than 12% six years later. In Brazil, the rate of obese or overweight children between 6 and 18 years old more than tripled: from 4% in the middle of the Seventies to more than 13% in 1997.