Rima Martens
Childhood obesity levels have reached epidemic status. With one in five children in Australia either obese or overweight by the time they start school, it is clear that there needs to be some changes made to the way our society thinks about food and exercise.
To tackle this issue, at the University of Sydney, a state of the art research centre was opened on Thursday the 21st of April in the Charles Perkins Centre (CPC). The 2.5 million dollar centre is designed to exclusively focus on the issue of childhood obesity levels, a leading movement in countering Australia’s health problems. The research centre will be host to internationally renowned experts from universities all across Australia, New Zealand and the UK and will be funded until 2020.
The key priority of the research will be obesity prevention, as the team investigate the significance of a child’s first five years of life and how these years impact their source of nutrition, digestion and exercise.
As Director of the Centre Professor Louise Baur from Sydney Medical School says, “The first few years of life are really vital for establishing patterns for good health, wellbeing and happiness across the lifespan. Yet significant changes in our broader environment have made it harder for children to eat well and be as active as they might have been a generation ago”.
The team will share data from existing trials to help develop new methods and tools to monitor obesity-related behaviours in young children. The team will consist of specialists from a vast array of disciplines including paediatricians, dieticians, health experts, economists and exercise physiologists as it is understood that obesity is affected by a large variety of factors.
The information collected and analysed will be will be used as “vital clues for policymakers and health practitioners, helping them to devise more effective public interventions on wide-ranging issues related to childhood obesity, from improving babies’ sleeping patterns to decreasing the amount of screen time” says Professor Baur.
Professor Baur also shares that “We know that behaviours that are really important for lifelong health and wellbeing – eating well, being active and sleeping patterns – are all established in early childhood. Intervening early and knowing how best to support parents in this crucial phase is essential in raising healthy children”.
Experts are finding that education in primary school is too late and makes it extremely hard to change patterns that are already established. Hopefully the team will and their research will serve as an important message for parents and families to be wise about the lifestyle that they demonstrate and pass on to their children.
