CHILDREN in Cyprus eat fattier and saltier foods, exercise the least and on top of that barely get enough sleep in comparison to those in northern Europe, a new survey revealed yesterday.
The survey, by the Research and Education Institute for Child Health, monitored about 2,500 children in Cyprus between two and eight years old, 1,000 in Paphos and 1,500 in Strovolos, Nicosia as part of a five-year Europe-wide €13 million project funded by the European Commission.
Children in Cyprus topped the chart when it came to eating salty snacks and chocolate and brought up the rear when it came to cooked vegetables.
Seven in ten children replaced healthy food with crisps, chocolates, pastries and other similar snacks.
“We have abandoned the main tenets of the Mediterranean diet: fruits and vegetables and pulses. Even children’s consumption of olive oil lies at the European average,” Michalis Tornaritis, the head of the institute, said yesterday.
He said that about a third of the children also had the maximum permitted cholesterol levels at about 170mg/dl with figures rising with age.
Children also exercised the least out of all of their European counterparts, “despite having much more sunshine than some northern countries who still manage to get their children moving more than us”, Tornaritis said.
Children in Cyprus also ranked low in terms of calcium consumption and omega3 fats which are necessary for healthy cells.
About three in five did not get enough vitamin C or A.
“These vitamins protect the organism against fat oxidisation which causes cancers as well as clogging up arteries,” Tornaritis said.
Cyprus ranked third for overweight kids with 23 per cent of children considered overweight compared to 40 per cent in Italy who ranked first.
Children in Estonia ranked last.
One in six Cypriot children who participated in the survey was considered obese.
And while pre-school children in Sweden get about 11 hours of sleep, children in Cyprus get about 9.5, close to the minimum sleep time required (between 9 and 11 hours a night) further increasing risk of obesity.
Cyprus participated in the survey along with Italy, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Germany, Belgium and Estonia.
Another three countries including the UK offered complementary research while Greece participated only in the survey.
The project looked at over 17,000 children (9,000 in a control group and the rest in an intervention group) from September 2006 to August 2011.
Data from seven different surveys between 1995 and 2005 were also pooled together to create a European database.
Cyprus Mail
