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70
Today, even the man in the street is aware that all is not well
with society's overweights but it would seem that only in the last
decade or two have the dangers of obesity to community health
been fully recognised and given due publicity.
Use of terms such as "overweight" and "obesity" suggests the
existence of a standard of normality with which comparison may
be made. This is not so. Neither this country nor any other country
has really solved the problem of collating reliable information on a
national scale, partly because of the enormity of the task and
partly because of the difficulty of devising a single study with
"terms" that would satisfy the nutritionalist, the sociologist, the
economist or, for that matter, the biochemist, the anthropometrist
and other technical participants.
There is neither an ideal nor a normal weight but only an
average weight which, by general agreement, is calculated from
the tens of thousands of experiments, measurements and observations
carried out by research workers and insurance companies
all over the country. Results are tabulated and appear as desirable
weights for particular heights at maturity and beyond. Even these
are subject to variation according to the type of skeletal frame
genetically inherited.
Nevertheless, there seems little doubt but that much of the
country's preventable disease can be attributed to faulty diet and
its corollary "overweight". Unfortunately, no field of medicine is
so riddled with faddism and quackery than that of obesity and
this will continue until more is known about the basic physiological,
psychological and genetic nature of the problem.
Although the seriousness of obesity in adult life is becoming increasingly
clear, there is a paucity of information concerning the
conditions in earlier life which could conceivably give rise to this
situation. In the past, too little official attention has been given to
this problem, especially in the formative years of life and, obesity
in boys and girls of all ages has become more common in recent
years. (In young school children the numbers are considered to be
small but increasing and it is thought that they could form as
much as 5% to 10% of the secondary school age group.)
Causes of overweight in children arc many and, in most cases,
the aetiology tends to be multi-factorial but recent results at an
urban Weight Control Clinic for schoolchildren have shown a
strong family history of obesity.
Many mothers have the idea that a fat baby is a healthy baby.
As a result, overfeeding occurs and the foundations for abnormal
dietary habits are laid which prove extremely difficult to break in
later life. Moreover, contrary to popular opinion, a great deal of