‘Stunting, obesity in Philippines alarming’

MANILA, Philippines — Apart from having thousands if not millions of stunted or wasted young Filipinos as well as those suffering from “hidden hunger” or micronutrient deficiency, there’s the emerging problem of obesity, which is a cause for alarm, a Netherlands-based Filipino food and nutrition scientist said.

Professor Gerald Bryan Gonzales, an expatriate Filipino academician serving as a senior scientist at the Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and also at the Universiteit Gent in Ghent, Belgium, said that the obesity rate of 3.9 percent of Filipino children aged 0 to five years old in the 2021 Expanded National Nutrition Survey (ENNS) conducted by the Department of Science and Technology-Food and Nutrition Research Institute, should not be ignored.

“The number of children that are obese in the country quadrupled. That is a very alarming rate,” Gonzales said.

“And at the same time, we are really not achieving a lot in terms of stunting and undernutrition,” Gonzales pointed out. “We were able to reduce the burden of undernutrition by half, but the burden of overnutrition quadrupled in 35 years.”

The 2021 ENNS had also found that one in every four or 26.7 percent of children under five years old was stunted. It also revealed that the prevalence of thinness or wasting prevalence among children under-five was 5.5 percent.

With regard to the prevalence of obesity, the 2021 ENNS said that for children 0 to 5 years old, it was 3.0 percent, and 14 percent for school-aged children 5 to 10 years old.

Gonzales said that while the World Health Organization (WHO) has already warned of a double burden of malnutrition, the triad of malnutrition problems existing in the country betrayed a triple burden of malnutrition in the Philippines.

“Again, these diseases are concentrated in countries where they could not necessarily afford to solve those problems,” he said.

Gonzales noted that the WHO, in its 2025 Action for Nutrition Program, had called on countries to undertake more efficient nutrition interventions especially in view of the emerging double burden of malnutrition where people, especially children, are facing the double challenge of undernutrition which causes stunting, and overnutrition which has caused a significant population of young people suffering obesity.

“We need to be more efficient in terms of our nutritional interventions. WHO called for what they called as ‘double duty actions for nutrition,’” Gonzales said. “These are actions that solve all forms of malnutrition with one intervention.”

Double duty actions, the WHO said, include interventions, programs and policies that have the potential to simultaneously reduce the risk or burden of both undernutrition and obesity or diet related NCDs (noncommunicable diseases).

“That is the big challenge that WHO gave us,” Gonzales said.