Italian children are getting fatter as they ditch a Mediterranean diet, rich in fruit and vegetable, for high-calorie snacks and beverages, Italian studies say.

Children are growing more obese across the developed world, where health experts often hold up southern European diets such as Italy’s as healthy examples to be followed.

But in Italy, like in Spain and Greece, more than 30 percent of children aged 7-11 are obese or overweight - the highest percentage in Western Europe - said Italy’s Paediatric Endocrinology Society (SIEDP).

“Over the past decade, child obesity has grown exponentially in the Western world. Unfortunately, our country, together with some other Mediterranean nations, occupies the top place in this negative category,” SIEDP former chairman Alessandro Cicognani said in a video interview posted on the group’s website.

The number of overweight and obese children has been growing by one percent a year since 2000, the Health Ministry’s Centre for Control and Prevention of Diseases said in a survey this month.

As children gain weight with high-calorie snacks and sweet bubbly drinks, they run a higher risk of heart diseases, cancer and diabetes and may become the first generation in recent times to live a shorter life than their parents, SIEDP said.

Obese - which means a body mass index, or a ratio of weight to height, equals or exceeds 30 - and overweight children have an 80 percent probability of becoming obese adults, Cicognani said.

The government will start a special nationwide programme to monitor child obesity in May to understand how to better combat the problem, said Health Ministry expert Letizia Zanetti.

“We need to rediscover the Mediterranean diet,” Zanetti told Reuters earlier this week.

Junk food and sedentary lifestyles mean every second Italian man is overweight or obese, and one in three women is overweight, the Health Ministry survey showed.

Obesity is more common among Italian men, among poorer and less educated people and is spreading wider in less economically developed southern Italy.

About 57,000 people die of diseases related to obesity every year in Italy, 10 percent of all deaths. That places Italy in the middle of a European range of between 4.3 percent and 18.5 percent, Zanetti said.

Reuters Health