Published on January 31, 2005

She is just two years old but is already suffering from high cholesterol levels, obesity, tooth decay and breathing problems. This little girl is not an exception. Her afflictions are becoming alarmingly common among children because of excessive consumption of sugar.

She is one of the young patients of Dr Suriyadeo Tripathi, a paediatrician at the Queen Sirikit National Institute of Child Health.

“These days we encounter three times as many obese children as we did 10 years ago,” Suriyadeo said. “A third of children living in urban areas are seriously overweight.”

Obesity could lead to grave afflictions even in the young, he stressed.

“Today more and more children are suffering from diabetes, an illness that usually afflicts middle-aged people,” Suriyadeo said.

He warned: “Unless the situation improves, we doctors might soon have to treat children suffering from heart disease caused by high cholesterol levels.”

Some of Suriyadeo’s young patients were so overweight that they needed a respirator and were forced to sleep on their sides as their lungs could not support their bodyweight.

A 10-year-old patient had died in his sleep because of breathlessness, Suriyadeo added.

Drastic changes in diet were to blame, he said. Kids today consume far more sugar than they used to – they gobble sweets and guzzle sweetened sodas.

A recent study has found that a Thai (adult or child) consumes an average of 16 teaspoons full of sugar a day. A daily sugar intake of more than six spoons full poses the danger of obesity.

Some of the young patients are found to have adopted highly unhealthy diets. A boy was consuming two litres of soft drink a day while the small girl mentioned above drank some 18 bottles of sweetened yoghurt and nibbled two packs of junk food snacks a day. Every day Suriyadeo treats more than 10 young patients whose various illnesses that have resulted from an excessive diet of sweet foods.

“Besides causing decaying teeth, sweets and candies can lead to obesity, nutrition deficiencies and short stature,” he said.

He added that children on average spend Bt16 a day on sweets, amounting to some Bt160 billion a year – or more than the annual budget of six major government ministries. “Children who have developed [obesity-related] illnesses often spend up to Bt100 a day on sweets,” he added.

Thai kids’ excessive sugar-consumption had reached epidemic proportions and precipitated a health crisis, said Dr Sirikiat Leangkobkit, a dentist at the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. Dentists have found that three-quarters of three-year-olds have caries (tooth decay), he said.

Decay in milk teeth tends to affect the health of permanent teeth, Sirikiat added.

He said that children’s addiction to sweet tastes was the result of bad habits by parents and relatives who spoon-fed kids with sweetened milk from as early as six months. Children who became addicted to a diet of sweetened milk would often end up craving more and more sweets as they grew older, Sirikiat warned.

“Fortunately, we’ve recently succeeded in improving a law that forbids the blending of sugar in the baby milk of children aged between 6 months and one year,” he said.

Yet the battle is far from won. Advertisements and television commercials for junk foods bombard children, luring them into adopting unhealthy eating habits, said Dr Wittaya Kulsomboon, one of the Senate’s consumer protection commissioners. No government authority in Thailand supervises the content of such advertising, whereas some countries have banned television commercials targeting children under 12.

The Ministry of Public Health is now running an “anti-sweets children” campaign aimed at decreasing the amounts of sugar children consume by making parents realise the risks of excessive sugar consumption for their children.

Chatrarat Kaewmorakot

The Nation

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