Today’s Sunday Observer carries a story, on Page 18, that is of great concern to us and should cause many parents, guardians, and other adults who are responsible for children’s welfare to sit up and take remedial or preventative action.

The story references the latest United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) child nutrition report, which points out that the global prevalence of obesity among school-age children and adolescents is more than that for those underweight for the first time in 2025.

According to UNICEF, the world has reached “a historic tipping point around obesity” as the medical condition is projected to rise among school-age children and adolescents between 2025 and 2030, both globally and across all regions except for North America and Western Europe.

The report states that, globally, one in 20 children under five years of age (five per cent) and one in five children and adolescents ages 5–19 years (20 per cent) are overweight. This amounts to 35 million children under five years of age, 391 million children and adolescents ages 5–19 years, and 427 million children and adolescents in total.

It also lists Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America as the top three regions for the prevalence of overweight across all age groups.

The report highlights a lot more data on this problem which scientists have described as one of the great health challenges of the century.

The UNICEF report, titled ‘Feeding profit: How food systems are failing children’ comes six months after a study published in The Lancet medical journal shared worrying data from 204 countries.

According to that study, the number of overweight or obese people worldwide rose from 929 million in 1990 to 2.6 billion in 2021. That led scientists to project that by the year 2050 some 3.8 billion adults, around 60 per cent of the global adult population, will be overweight or obese. Additionally, they predicted a 121 per cent increase in obesity among children and adolescents worldwide.

The researchers also warned that if the world continues on that trend, health systems will come under crippling pressure with approximately a quarter of the world’s obese expected to be aged over 65 by 2050.

We join UNICEF’s call for urgent action to halt this upward trend which places in jeopardy “the health and future potential of children, communities, and nations”.

Thankfully, as we have pointed out before, Caribbean governments have not been lethargic in relation to this problem. Here in Jamaica, for instance, the Administration has implemented a number of policies including food-based dietary guidelines and wellness campaigns that support proper nutrition and encourage physical activity.

Jamaica’s Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton has been crusading on this issue since his appointment. However, he has repeatedly pointed out that “combating this crisis requires each of us to take responsibility for our health”.

That message, we note, has been embraced by many Jamaicans as there is evidence of increased activity, not just among people exercising daily, but with corporate entities staging wellness and healthy lifestyle programmes for staff in which they have incorporated the health and wellness ministry’s extremely important Know Your Numbers campaign.

We reiterate, though, that those efforts cannot be enough, as there are still too many Jamaicans falling victim to non-communicable diseases, with cardiovascular diseases and cancers contributing the highest share of potential years of life lost.

With that in mind, we urge all Jamaicans to embrace and act on the appeals for us to make healthy food choices and engage in more physical activity.

The matter is even more urgent in the case of children, for as UNICEF pointed out, “The earlier obesity begins in childhood, the longer the child is exposed to serious health risks, and the greater the likelihood that these risks will persist into adulthood.”