Stunting, obesity in Phl alarming'

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.

- RAINIER ALLAN RONDA

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.