So the UK is to ban the sale of sweets near supermarket checkouts and the offer of two-for-one deals on junk food.
Under a government campaign against childhood obesity, UK ministers are also considering barring cartoons from promoting junk food and are consulting on making it illegal to sell energy drinks to anyone under the age of 16.
Unlimited refills of sugary soft drinks in restaurants may also be outlawed by the child obesity strategy.
“Where food is placed in shops and how it is promoted can influence the way we shop and it is more common for HFSS (high in fat, sugar and salt) products to be placed in the most prominent places in store as well as sold on promotion, for example, with ‘buy one get one free’ offers,” says a report, after research was released showing around half of television food and drink adverts seen by children are for HFSS products or for fast food restaurants.
The advertising of junk food products has been banned during children’s programmes since 2007, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that 70 per cent of TV campaigns for HFSS products or restaurants are screened early evenings.
Evidence suggests that in 2016 children spent 64pc of their viewing time watching television outside children’s programming.
Apparently the number of obese children and adolescents worldwide has jumped tenfold in the past 40 years and the rise is accelerating in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Asia.
Childhood and teen obesity rates have levelled off in the US, north-western Europe and other rich countries, but remain “unacceptably high” there, say researchers at Imperial College London and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
“Over 40 years we have gone from about 11 million to a more than tenfold increase to over 120m obese children and adolescents throughout the world,” says lead study author Majid Ezzati of Imperial’s School of Public Health.
This means that nearly eight per cent of boys and nearly six per cent of girls worldwide were obese in 2016, against less than one per cent for both sexes in 1975.
An additional 213m children aged between five and 19 are overweight, but fall below the threshold for obesity, according to the largest ever study, based on height and weight measurements of 129m people.
If current trends continue, say experts, in 2022 there will be more obese children and teenagers worldwide than underweight ones, who now number 192m, half of them in India.
Polynesia and Micronesia have the highest rates of child obesity, 25.4pc in girls and 22.4pc in boys, followed by “the high-income English-speaking region” that includes the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Britain.
That is actually quite scary, when you think about it.
According to WHO, at least 2.8m people die every year for being overweight or obese.
The worldwide prevalence of obesity has more than doubled between 1980 and 2014, with 13pc of the world’s adult population alone found to be obese last year.
In a survey released this year by Zurich International Life, 47.5pc of UAE residents were overweight, with a BMI of between 25 and 30, while another 13pc were obese, with a BMI of over 30.
Since the average BMI in the UAE is 25.6, the average UAE resident is considered overweight.
Forty per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds and 20pc of children under the age of 11 in the UAE are obese!
So perhaps we should follow suit here too and ban sweets from checkout counters. Ok yes tax has been added on fizzy drinks but is that enough?!
Reem Antoon is a former GDN news editor. She can be reached on: clanmun4@gmail.com