Children as young as two admitted to hospital for being too fat

ENGLAND: Children as young as two are being admitted to hospital for obesity, shocking new figures reveal.

Over the past three years, 85 children in Merseyside have been admitted to hospital because they are so fat.

At Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, 62 children under the age of 15 have been admitted to the trust with a primary diagnosis of obesity since 2011, while 23 kids have been sent to St Helens and Knowsley hospitals.

The figures have been released just weeks after the ECHO revealed more than a third of 10 and 11-year-olds in Merseyside are overweight .

In Liverpool 38.8 per cent of Year 6 pupils were clinically overweight or obese in 2013/14, according to official statistics – way above the English average of 33.5 per cent.

Meanwhile the equivalent figure in nearby Knowsley was 37.2 per cent, in Sefton it was 35.3 per cent, in Wirral it was 34.9 per cent and in St Helens it was 36.9 per cent.

And around a quarter of four and five-year-olds in the region are also losing the battle against the bulge.

Experts warn that childhood obesity is a “ticking timebomb” and something must be done urgently to break kids’ bad habits.

Keep Reading

Tam Fry, the chairman of the Child Growth Foundation and the National Obesity Forum, said kids are being born “macrosomic” meaning their mums have been eating too much during pregnancy, making them more likely to be obese babies.

He said: “It’s tragic. The obesity epidemic starts at birth and more must be done to not only educate our children, but parents too.

“When babies are born obese or develop obesity from an early age, as much as possible needs to be done as soon as possible to watch a child’s weight. But this doesn’t happen enough.”

In Merseyside, 23 children under the age of seven have been hospitalised over the past three years and 46 under-10s have been treated in hospital for obesity.

Treatments include a glucose tolerance test – which is normally used to diagnose type 2 diabetes – blood tests and hormone therapy.

Paul Watson, senior lecturer in exercise and health psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, said the danger is that children are picking up bad lifestyle habits from their parents.

“It’s an extreme situation for two-year-olds to be hospitalised for obesity,” she said.

“There needs to be a multi-agency approach to help tackle this. It’s a whole cultural problem.

“People need to realise that it’s a medical condition and treat it that way because there is still a huge stigma around it.”