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Home » Lose Weight » Docs advising 'surprisingly few' overweight Canadians to shed pounds: study

Canada may be in the grips of an obesity epidemic but doctors are advising "surprisingly few" overweight or obese Canadians to lose weight, a national survey finds.

Less than a third of overweight people who responded to the survey had ever been advised to lose weight by a physician, without specifically asking "a further indication of the widely held societal view that obesity is an issue of personal responsibility rather than a medical problem," researchers write in the journal Chronic Diseases and Injuries in Canada.

In addition, fewer than one in five of total survey participants reported having their waistlines measured by a doctor in the previous year, even though Canadian guidelines recommend doctors screen every adult for weight-related problems by measuring waist circumference considered the new "vital sign" that predicts a person's risk of disease and death beyond body mass index alone.

People with abdominal fat are at the highest risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease and stroke. Belly fat is also the leading cause of a cluster of abnormalities known as metabolic syndrome.

The survey also found that 40 per cent of overweight or obese Canadians described themselves as "about right."

Lead author Sara Kirk calls it part of the "normalization" of excess weight: As the population grows heavier, overweight becomes the new norm.

Currently, 59 per cent of adult Canadians are either overweight or obese. Unless trends change, by 2026, the proportion will reach 70 per cent, a federal-provincial summit on healthy weights heard last week in Ottawa.

Severe obesity is tracking at an even faster rate than obesity. Class III obesity, meaning a body mass index of 40 or more, has tripled over the past three decades a phenomenon that is posing significant challenges for the health-care system, from patients too large to fit inside CT scanners or MRI machines, to what intensive care physicians have described as the "nightmare" of trying to insert breathing tubes into patients whose airways are heavy with fat.

Overall, people with a BMI greater than 30 are four times as likely to have diabetes, three times as likely to have hypertension and 1 1/2 times as likely to have heart disease, the researchers write.

Despite such "stark statistics," obesity is poorly managed in Canada, said Kirk, Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

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Docs advising 'surprisingly few' overweight Canadians to shed pounds: study

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Home » Lose Weight » Docs advising 'surprisingly few' overweight Canadians to shed pounds: study