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05 August 2003
Weights and waists
 IF we are to believe newspaper reports,
we now face an epidemic of obesity among children and adults. Walk
around our plush malls and it would seem Filipinos are indeed expanding,
vertically and horizontally.
It was Dr. Cecilia Florencio, of the University of the Philippines'
College of Home Economics, who pointed out during a recent talk that
such claims, especially for Filipino children, are exaggerated. Her
speech led me to check around for nutrition statistics, which I found
compiled in a handy little booklet, "Philippine Nutrition: Facts
and Figures," produced by the government's Food and Nutrition
Research Institute (FNRI). The book is based on the 1993 and 1998
National Nutrition Surveys (NNS) but was published only in 2001 and
hasn't been widely circulated despite its wealth of information, from
average waistlines to blood cholesterol levels.
Let's look at the nutrition figures for children. Using World Health
Organization (WHO) standards, the surveys found that among our preschool
children, 68 percent had normal weights for their age while 32 percent
were underweight. Comparing heights with age, 66 out of every 100
children were found to be normal while 34 were stunted.
You might be asking, so what happened to the over-nourished among our
preschool children? In the categories I just named, these
"over-nourished" children -- overweight or "too"
tall -- constituted only four out of every 1,000 children, or less than
one percent.
Similar figures are found for older children. Among children of school
age, meaning those six to 10 years old, 30 percent were found
underweight while the number of those who were overweight was described
as "negligible." Using heights for age standards, 59 percent
were found normal while 41 were stunted; the number of those who were
too tall was again negligible.
Overweight figures finally break the 1 percent mark only among
adolescents. In this age group of 11- to 19-year-olds, 57 percent had
normal weights, 40 percent were underweight and about three percent were
overweight.
Let's go to the adults, where there are some startling figures for
heights and weights. Among those aged 60 and over, the average height
was 153 centimeters (five feet). Among those aged 40 to 59, the average
height was 156.2 cm (5 feet 1 inch) and among those aged 20 to 39, this
increases to 157.6 cm (5 feet 2 inches). While it seems that Filipinos
are growing taller, by and large we are still very short.
There were significant differences in the average heights by sex. Among
those aged 20 to 39, the average height for men was 163.3 cm or 5 feet 4
inches. Among females in that age group, the average height was only
151.4 cm or about 4 feet 11.5 inches, which means our President is well
within the norm!
With such average heights, it shouldn't be surprising the weights for
Filipino adults are also relatively low: 55.2 kilograms (121 pounds) for
those aged 20 to 39, 55.4 kg (122 pounds) for those aged 40 to 59 and
49.7 kg (109 pounds) for those aged 60 and over.
The last National Nutrition Survey also looked at the mean waist
circumference or average waistlines among Filipinos aged 20 and over.
Among men, the average waistline was 79 cm or 31 inches while for women
it was 74 cm or 29 inches. These may seem to be low figures but when you
look at average heights and weights, the waistline figures do make
sense. Try and imagine the average Filipino male, standing 5 feet 1,
with a 31-inch waistline.
There is a kind of battle of waistlines going on among regions. If
you're looking for men with love handles, you're more likely to find
them in the Central Luzon region, where the average waistline was found
to be 84 cm (33 inches). On the other hand, the slimmest male waistlines
were found in the Western Visayas (the Ilonggos) with an average of 76.7
cm or 30 inches.
Among females, the largest girths were found, surprisingly, in the
Cordillera Administrative Region with an average of 82.2 cm (32.3
inches) while women in the neighboring Cagayan Valley romped away with
the slimmest waists of 71.2 cm (28 inches).
Our nutritionists are interested in high waist circumferences because
this is an indicator of increased risks for hypertension, heart disease,
diabetes and other diseases. The National Nutrition Survey found there
were actually more females (10.7 percent of the total) who fall in this
risk classification than males (2.7 percent), again contradicting
popular perceptions about body shapes.
It's interesting that while the average waistline in the National
Capital Region isn't that high, it does have the most number of people
with wide girths: 2.4 percent of males and 23.3 percent of females. (The
definition of a high waist circumference is more than 102 cm or 40
inches for males and 88 cm or 34.6 inches for females.) The higher
incomes in Metro Manila don't necessarily translate into healthier
diets.
It isn't just our body measurements that paint a bleak picture. The
nutrition surveys also took blood to check for diet-related problems.
The results were also disturbing. For example, 15 percent of the
population had high cholesterol levels and half of pregnant women were
suffering from iron deficiency anemia.
The picture we get from our nutrition surveys is depressing, showing a
vicious cycle of undernourished anemic mothers delivering malnourished
babies, who grow up chronically underweight and stunted. Our
malnutrition is also paradoxical: on one hand, serious under-nutrition
especially among our children, and on the other hand, we do have
"over-nutrition" emerging with the older age groups, from junk
foods and fast foods.
Many of our problems are due to the lack of support for feeding programs
and for nutrition education. It doesn't help that politicians still
favor one-shot, dole-out programs that feed people for a day or two and
then leave them with crumbs the rest of the year. Unless we get our act
together with nutrition, we can forget all talk about national
development.
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