New childhood obesity guidelines: Obesity Canada on how they will help

Health Canada reports obesity in children has nearly tripled in Canada over the last 30 years. Obesity Canada now has new childhood obesity guidelines to help.

According to Health Canada, obesity in children has nearly tripled in Canada over the last 30 years. Now, there are new childhood obesity guidelines. Dr. Tasneem Sajwani with Obesity Canada joined CTV Morning Live Edmonton to share how they can help those children.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: Can you tell us about some of the biggest changes we’ve made?

Dr. Tasneem Sajwani: The biggest changes would be that we now have more tools in our toolbox to potentially offer our patients with obesity, not only adults but children specifically, and their families who struggle with obesity. In the past, we’ve relied mostly on the old adage of exercise and dieting is what’s going to help these children move forward, whereas now we have a few more tools in our toolbox. That is a really great conversation that we can have with our families and our children, where we can give them more options and move forward and actually help them with improving their quality of life, to reduce their disease burden.

Kent: Beyond diet and exercise, what are some of those new tools in the tool kit?

Dr. Sajwani: Fortunately, we do have some effective pharmacotherapy and we have some surgical options, just like we would for adults. However, these are tools that we can have conversations around, but not be all end all. This always goes with the psychological and the behavioral interventions, nutrition, physical activity, discussion and options.

Kent: We talked at the beginning about the numbers growing in Canada, in people with disabilities and specifically children. What are the risks associated with obesity?

Dr. Sajwani: Children that have obesity tend to move on to have obesity in adulthood. In fact, 80 per cent of children that are in the age between 12 to 17 that have obesity move on to having obesity as adults. The diseases that are associated with obesity, almost 200, but more commonly, hypertension, diabetes, different cancers, actually become more risky for them as they move forward into their lives.

Kent: What would your advice be for parents and guardians as to when to seek potentially help with obesity?

Dr. Sajwani: I think being in really great communication with your health-care providers in general, just to discuss general health, is where we can potentially diagnose those issues early. If there is a diagnosis of obesity – because obesity is not just a BMI, obesity is not just a social construct of what people think is obesity – but if there is adiposity that affects health that harms children, then there is that conversation to be had. I think the only way we can do that is to have clear communications and frequent visits with health care providers.

Kent: This report also says obesity is a chronic disease. What does that mean for people?

Dr. Sajwani: It means that this is a chronic, relapsing, remitting disease that is usually genetically conferred. It is not something that we can treat and disappear. This is something that we do need to manage for the rest of our lives.

Kent: What else would you like for people to take out of this report?

Dr. Sajwani: That weight and obesity is not a behavior, this is truly a chronic medical disease. I’m talking about adiposity that causes harm, not the social construct around what obesity looks like. And if we don’t tackle this early on, and if we don’t tackle this when it is occurring, then we are going to move into areas of more severe diseases. We want to prevent that. We want to start treating it early so that these children don’t have to deal with complications of obesity and diseases associated with obesity.