Lack of exercise and the Mediterranean diet is causing obesity in Tenerife and the Canary Islands
The benefits of the Mediterranean Diet are well known, but it seems that the habits of generations are being lost in Andalucía, where now one in three children is overweight or obese. It is, along with the Canaries, the Spanish region to suffer this public health problem the most, and the situation is not much better for adults either where 15% of andaluces are above their ideal weight, and where a growth in the numbers of 2% a year is being seen, according to the Integral Plan against Child Obesity from the Junta de Andalucía.
Their latest studies show one of the main causes, children are not going out to play or take part in sports as before, with some of them not taking even 1,000 steps a day. There is an economic element too, with children from poorer families more likely to suffer obesity.
70% of people in Andalucía don’t do any exercise after work, and many that do only do so on doctors’ orders, when the damage has already been done. As one specialist put it, ‘You see people running in the parks, but they are always the same people’. A gentle walk for an hour a day is calculated to result in a weight loss of 7.3 kilos at the end of the year.
A recent study quoted by El País compared the diet of a child in El Palo, the fishing quarter of Málaga, with that of a child in Liverpool, and there was little difference. No longer it seems are the children in Andalucía being fed the beans, vegetables, fruit and olive oil of before. Instead they are becoming increasingly at risk from type II diabetes.
