Argentina has the highest rate of infant obesity(1)

Pediatricians and nutritionists stress that there is no single factor explaining why Argentina is the country in Latin America with the highest rate of obese and overweight children.

“In Argentina, between 2.5 and 3.0 percent of preschoolers were obese in the 1980s, compared to 10 percent today,” said Dr. Esteban Carmuega, with the Centre of Studies on Child Nutrition (CESNI). “We lead the statistics in the region.”

The average for South America is 6.8 percent, Carmuega said.

But he added that the rise in obesity is a region wide problem.

Neighboring Chile and Uruguay have rates only slightly lower than Argentina’s. “It’s difficult to come up with an answer. I believe that there is a multiplicity of factors here, rather than just one killer,” he said.

Dr. Miriam Tonietti, secretary of the nutrition committee of the Argentine Society of Pediatrics, concurred.  

“We are seeing that young children are also suffering from serious diseases related to obesity, such as hypertension, changes in the levels of blood lipids, and altered glucose metabolism, which precedes diabetes,” she noted.

“We didn’t see these symptoms at such a young age in the past,” said Tonietti, a pediatrician at Dr. Ricardo Gutiérrez Children’s Hospital in Buenos Aires. “The prognosis is complicated, and the life expectancy of these children is very poor.”

The worst complications, she said, are type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But there are a number of other problems associated with excess weight in childhood, including trauma and psychological issues, she said.

Like Carmuega, Tonietti does not attribute obesity to one single cause. “Obesity is a multifactor phenomenon, conditioned by genetics,” she explained.

She said, however, what stands out in Latin America is the “nutritional transition.” As part of that transition, she mentioned the process of rural-urban migration by people seeking better employment opportunities.

“People are uprooted, they lose their culture and their diet, and foods rich in fats and sugar become prevalent,” she concluded.

The experts said that foods rich in nutrients are more expensive, which also increases the risk of obesity among the poor. And they also point out that obesity is not the opposite of malnutrition, but part of the same problem.

“For a long time, we were concerned about accelerating the growth rates of children, and we gave them more food as soon as we noticed they were going down in weight. What we are seeing now can also be a consequence of that,” said Carmuega.