Roughly one-third of Canadian children are living with obesity or overweight. Those rates, which have nearly tripled in the last 30 years, continue to rise among children in the country at an unprecedented velocity.
Many people carrying extra weight in childhood may often be told that they’ll grow out of it or that it’s just baby fat. However, as researchers continue to dig deeper into the obesity epidemic in the country, those sentiments are becoming more and more mythical.
Dr. Julie St-Pierre, a pediatrician with a special focus on pediatric obesity and researcher and professor at McGill University in Ottawa, has dedicated her life to understanding all there is to know about childhood obesity, from what it means for children and how it affects those children later in life.
As she’s discovered through her work, the epidemic is multifactorial, but generally, it comes down to genetics.
“It has always been about genes,” she said. “There are over 1,000 genes involved in the development of obesity and, of course, all those genes are in relation with the environment.”
She goes on to say that, over time, the environments in which children grow up today are pushing obesity rates higher simply because times have drastically changed.