Estimates suggest 170 million children and adolescents worldwide are obese. <\/p>\n
That includes 70 million children aged 5\u20139. Obesity prevalence in this age group has quadrupled since 1990, rising from 2% to 8%.<\/p>\n
In 2024, 35 million children under the age of five were overweight.<\/p>\n
Obesity increases the risk of many different diseases, including type 2 diabetes. <\/p>\n
Dr Luz De Rigil, Director of Nutrition and Food Safety at WHO, said: “For children under 10, WHO does not recommend obesity medicines, bariatric surgery or weight-management devices. This is a strong recommendation.”<\/p>\n
These might be appropriate for older children and adolescents when lifestyle approaches have failed and if the individual is “mentally and physically prepared” for the treatment, she added.<\/p>\n
She said WHO recognises this is an evolving field and will continue to evaluate the evidence. <\/p>\n
WHO’s head of Nutrition and Food Safety Actions, Laurence Grummer-Strawn, said: “We are particularly concerned in this age group, if you are starting children very early on to using a GLP-1 or drugs like this, when does that stop? <\/p>\n
“We don’t really have evidence that you can use this as a temporary treatment and then turn to something dietary later on in life.<\/p>\n
“We are very cautious about jumping in without clear evidence,” he said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Estimates suggest 170 million children and adolescents worldwide are obese. That includes 70 million children aged 5\u20139. Obesity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":794723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-794722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}