© ANP / Joyce van Belkom
The lockdowns during the corona pandemic have indirectly caused a large increase in obesity among children. More than a quarter of them moved less during that period, according to a survey by the World Health Organization.
The World Health Organization (WHO) relies on data on more than 50,000 children from 17 countries in the European region. Parents from Italy, Portugal, Turkey and Romania, among others, completed questionnaires about the lifestyle of their children aged 7 to 9 before and during the pandemic. This made it possible to see afterwards what changes took place during the pandemic.
The WHO study confirms the suspicion that staying at home due to the lockdowns has not done any good to the physical fitness of children. The percentage who were of normal weight according to their parents fell from 82 percent to 73 percent. The percentage of children who were overweight according to their parents doubled in the countries studied: from 8 percent to 16 percent.
Previous research had already made it clear that many children and young people also started to feel worse mentally during the corona pandemic. This study confirms this once again: one in five children felt sad more often during the ‘corona years’, and one in four was lonely more often.
