A study on prevalence of obesity, overweight and food habit of school going children in Rupnagar, Mirpur, Dhaka

Abstract

An emerging urban health problem of childhood obesity in urban cities of Bangladesh. There are many risk factors of obesity but some are not explored yet. The objective of this study was to identify the risk factors associated with overweight and obesity among school children and adolescents in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This study estimate the level of overweight and obesity in the urban areas Bangladesh using data from Baseline survey at the specific school. A simple random sampling was used for selecting 120 students aged 11-15 years. Interview was done by recording the data from questionnaire. The questionnaire was done by asking about occupation of father and mother, personal information, socio-economic condition of family, food behaviour of each students and physical activity performed by the students. Data from the questionnaires were coded and entered into the computer using SPSS, version 25. The data were analysed with descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations). Cross tabulations and chisquare analysis were used to examine the relationship between the variables in order to describe the problem or identify possible explanations. Significance was accepted at p < .05. Results revealed that 6.7% are obese, 12.5% are overweight, 31.7% are underweight and 49.2% are normal weight as per BMI measurement. Risk of being overweight are high among the adolescent and young children. Consumption of fast foods are 30-39.2% among the students and the frequency of their eating is 3-4 times in a week. The students of urban areas shows a lacking in physical activities, most of them don’t get enough time to play or doing any physical activities during school period. Only 27.5% students are physically active in a day. There is a good evidence that the lower and middle income country like Bangladesh is at the risk of the burden of overweight and obesity. Obesity and overweight is increasing day by day at lower income countries.