‘Many pupils have not eaten’

Black and coloured South African children aged under five remain "perpetually disadvantaged", says a Stats SA report. File photo: David Ritchie

Black and coloured South African children aged under five remain "perpetually disadvantaged", says a Stats SA report. File photo: David Ritchie

Published Aug 7, 2013

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Cape Town - The SA National Health and Nutritional and Examination Survey (Sanhanes) by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has painted a bleak picture of the country’s health status, but even more disturbing is the fact that many of the country’s children still go to school without food.

The survey showed that not only were children’s growth stunted, increasing from 23.4 percent in 2005 to 26.5 percent this year, but 34 percent of children had no food to eat for breakfast.

Almost 40 percent of the children said they did not eat breakfast because they were not hungry in the morning, 33 percent said people at home did not eat breakfast and 15.3 percent could not make their own breakfast.

Only 37 percent of children had enough food for the whole day, with 30 percent reporting they had nothing to put in their lunchbox, while 18.3 percent had no one at home to help pack a lunchbox.

While 9.5 percent of children were severely stunted, and about 6 percent underweight, the study also revealed there was also a high prevalence of being overweight or obese among girls aged two to 14, at 16.5 percent (overweight) and 7 percent (obese). This was significantly higher than boys at 11.5 percent overweight and about 5 percent obese.

Obesity was highest in the two-to-five-year age group, at 19 percent and 5 percent respectively for girls, and 17.5 percent and 4.4 percent for boys.

The report also showed that the prevalence of overweight children had increased over the past decade, jumping from 10.6 percent to 18.2 percent, while that of obesity remained unchanged from 4.5 percent to 4.7 percent.

The majority of children – about 82 percent of boys and 78 percent of girls – were happy with their weight while more children thought their body mass index (BMI) was higher than their measured BMI.

Professor Olive Shisana, HSRC chief executive, said that compared with other African countries such as Morocco, Swaziland and Botswana, South Africa’s overweight and obese cases were at 22 percent, with those countries at 11 percent.

While it was encouraging that the majority of children (86 percent) believed it was important to have breakfast, it was concerning that almost 30 percent of these children had no food to put in their lunchboxes.

“Measures to improve food security in vulnerable communities are imperative,” said Shisana.

Cape Argus

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