Why We’re Focusing on Childhood Obesity Prevention

At the end of last year, we started developing our two-year strategy after a year of exploring the public health landscape in St Kitts and Nevis, and the wider Caribbean region.

After careful consideration, we settled on focusing on women’s health and the prevention of childhood obesity. In a previous blog we explained why we decided to focus on women’s health and today we’ll discuss why we’re also going to focus on childhood obesity.

Why Childhood Obesity?

Childhood obesity is a major health issue in the Caribbean with 1 in 3 children being overweight or obese. The rate of childhood obesity in the Caribbean is higher than the global average and is reported to be on the rise.

Being obese and overweight in childhood is linked to the development of several health issues such as type 2 diabetes and hypertension, and it also negatively impacts a child’s mental health. These health issues can follow children into adulthood with children affected by obesity, or who are overweight, having an increased risk of becoming overweight or obese adults and developing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer and heart disease in later life.

Childhood Obesity in St Kitts and Nevis

Childhood obesity is a significant challenge here in St Kitts and Nevis. A PAHO report revealed that 33% of secondary school children in the twin-island state were overweight and 14% were obese. More recently, in 2017, a UNICEF report published that 26% of children in St Kitts and Nevis are obese.

Data has demonstrated that NCDs are becoming an epidemic in the Federation with 83% of deaths in St Kitts and Nevis being due to NCDs. We must do something about this to prevent our citizens from dying prematurely and one approach is to tackle childhood obesity.

To combat childhood obesity, we have to ensure that children adopt a healthy lifestyle and we also have to create a healthy environment at schools, in homes and within society so that children can make healthy choices.

Tackling Childhood Obesity in the Caribbean

The Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC) is a civil society member organisation that was established to combat NCDs and their associated risk factors.

One of their key focus areas is childhood obesity prevention and as part of their work, they published their Civil Society Action Plan for Preventing Childhood Obesity in the Caribbean. This plan provides guidance on how HCC members (we are a member) can strategically address this significant health challenge in their specific island states.

Lake Health and Wellbeing is thus aiming to align its strategy for childhood obesity prevention in St Kitts and Nevis with the following HCC priority areas:

Trade and fiscal policy (taxation of unhealthy foods)
Nutrition literacy (mandatory front-of-pack-labelling of foods)
Early childhood nutrition (enacting legislation related to the International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes)
Marketing of healthy and unhealthy foods to children (Banning the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children)
School and community-based interventions (Banning the marketing and sale of unhealthy foods and beverages in and around schools, mandatory physical activity in schools)

What We’ve Done So Far

We’ll be taking our time and starting slowly with the implementation of our childhood obesity prevention strategy. We’re delighted to say that we have started making some progress and have achieved the following:

We took part in the HCC’s regional campaign which aimed to raise awareness of childhood obesity in the Caribbean and influence the region’s leaders to champion and implement critical policies that will improve the health of our children and reduce childhood obesity. One of the key parts of this campaign was their childhood obesity prevention petition (call-to-ac tion) which called on our Heads of Government to enact key policies and legislation which have been demonstrated as effective measures to combat childhood obesity. We got involved by gaining support for the HCC’s petition in St Kitts and raising awareness of this issue through a four-part podcast series. You can find out more about this here

We’ve started advocating for front-of-pack nutrition labelling as this is an easy way for parents to assess the health of the foods they purchase. We submitted a response to the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality‘s consultation on pre-packaged food labelling which included front-of-pack food labelling and are now a member of the SKNBS Technical Committee for Labelling.

We have also started advocating for the introduction of a sugar-sweetened beverage tax in St Kitts and Nevis. As part of this process, we attended the Ministry of Health’s National SSB Consultation, have prepared a position statement of SSB taxation in St Kitts and will be attending an SSB focus group, at the end of April 2019, organised by the Ministry of Health.