Children aged 3 to 5 who do not have a garden are said to have a much higher risk than others of becoming obese before the age of 7. The benefits for the well-being and health of green spaces are already recognized. But this study, carried out by Dutch researchers, is the first to show how living confined in an apartment could have a bad impact on children’s health.
To reach these conclusions, the team of researchers followed around 6,500 British children for 4 years, looking in particular at their family life and their weight. They find that even when they took into account criteria like diet, physical activity, education and poverty, not having a garden was a risk factor that significantly influenced weight gain.
The WHO has declared childhood obesity to be one of the most serious health problems of the 21st century. When children and adolescents who are obese are more likely to become obese adults, they are later exposed to more health problems associated with this chronic disease, such as the risk of developing type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
“Limited access to green spaces has been shown to be associated with future overweight and obesity in children,” commented lead study author Annemarie Schalkwijk from VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam (The Netherlands ). “More research is needed to see how we can use these findings to prevent type 2 diabetes,” she concludes.
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