Growing Up Overweight: How Food Environments are Failing a Generation
Childhood overweight in East Asia and the Pacific has doubled since 2000, making the region the epicentre of a global nutrition crisis.
Highlights
Childhood overweight in East Asia and the Pacific has doubled since 2000, with more than 113 million children now affected — one in four of all children living with overweight worldwide. Obesity among children aged 5–19 years is now twice as common as underweight, placing the region at the heart of a global nutrition crisis.
This media brief, Growing Up Overweight: How Food Environments Are Failing a Generation, details how food environments dominated by ultra-processed products, aggressive marketing, and weak regulation are driving this alarming trend. It also highlights progress already underway — from marketing restrictions in Thailand and sugar-sweetened beverage taxes in Viet Nam to child-friendly retail pilots in China and youth-led advocacy across the region.
The brief calls for urgent government action to transform food environments: mandatory front-of-pack labelling, comprehensive restrictions on unhealthy food marketing, stronger school food standards, sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, and platforms to amplify young people’s voices.
