Health campaign targets fat kids

Around 20 per cent of Swiss children are overweight Keystone

The federal authorities are launching a campaign to combat obesity among young children in Switzerland.

A programme, to get off the ground officially on Monday, targets children aged five to ten and aims at introducing an additional hour of physical education per week.

The head of the Federal Sport Office, Matthias Remund, said there is an increasing number of children who are overweight and risk ending up as disabled people or as a burden for the health system.

“We have a serious problem and we can not afford to ignore it,” he is quoted as saying in several Sunday newspapers.

Remund said that few children can do a somersault and that more and more children develop diabetes.

The number of obese children has increased five-fold since 1980, with one in five children overweight.

Overall Switzerland’s 7.5–million population is carrying round an estimated 50 million kilograms of excess weight, according to the Federal Sport Office.

Voluntary

Remund said parents often do not pay enough attention to the fitness of their children.

“We are not giving orders, but we would like to offer incentives, and purely on a voluntary basis,” he added.

Remund said an existing fitness programme for teenagers, known as Youth and Sport, should be extended to about 150,000 children. Teachers and coaches of youth organisations are to be trained up specifically to encourage kids to mind their health.

The programme, which requires a change in the law, will result in annual costs of some SFr20 million ($18 million), according to Remund. First trials were launched last August.

Doping

In another development, Remund called for harsher penalties against people using illegal doping substances in sport.

He said the Federal Sport Office was preparing regulations to combat doping and to crack down on people providing illegal substances to youngsters.

“We have to become more efficient. A legal amendment should help improve cooperation between the federal authorities and the cantons,” Remund said.

He added that existing rules – set up by sports organisations – to fight the use of doping were strict.

Half of the reported 18 doping cases in 2006 concerned the use of marijuana and other drugs, said Remund.

swissinfo with agencies

In brief

The Youth and Sport programme offers activities in 75 disciplines and reaches an estimated 550,000 people aged 10 to 20 every year.

The project, which started off as training courses for future members of the militia army, was launched in 1972, in cooperation with the country’s 26 cantons and private sports clubs.

In 2004 around 590,000 participants of both sexes took part in sports activities, most of them in football, skiing and snowboarding as well as hiking.