The is­sue of obe­si­ty con­tin­ues to com­mand the eclec­tic at­ten­tion of lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al re­searchers. The find­ings of the UWI, Health Eco­nom­ic Unit (HEU) ev­i­dence-based knowl­edge col­lab­o­ra­tive study with the In­sti­tute for Clin­i­cal Ef­fec­tive­ness for es­tab­lish­ing sug­ar-sweet­ened bev­er­age con­trol poli­cies sug­gest:

· ex­ces­sive con­sump­tion of sug­ary bev­er­ages is as­so­ci­at­ed with in­creas­es in dis­eases, deaths and ris­ing health­care costs.

· Util­is­ing 2020 es­ti­mates, the mod­el es­ti­mat­ed that every year, 387 deaths in Trinidad and To­ba­go may be as­so­ci­at­ed with the ex­ces­sive con­sump­tion of sug­ary bev­er­ages and 9,000 years of healthy life are lost due to pre­ma­ture death and dis­abil­i­ty.

· Fur­ther, study es­ti­mates showed that ap­prox­i­mate­ly TT$156 mil­lion was spent in the pub­lic health­care sys­tem to treat dis­eases as­so­ci­at­ed with ex­ces­sive con­sump­tion of sug­ary bev­er­ages.

· This was rough­ly 1.37 per cent of Trinidad and To­ba­go´s year­ly in­vest­ment in health­care. Of this amount, ap­prox­i­mate­ly TT$13 mil­lion was es­ti­mat­ed for the treat­ment of over­weight and obe­si­ty (in child­hood, ado­les­cence and adult­hood for both sex­es).

· The ma­jor­i­ty, TT$143 mil­lion, was as­so­ci­at­ed with the treat­ment of di­a­betes, car­dio­vas­cu­lar and re­nal dis­ease, mus­cu­loskele­tal dis­or­ders, can­cer and oth­er con­di­tions, which may be as­so­ci­at­ed with the ex­ces­sive con­sump­tion of sug­ary drinks. https://sta.uwi.edu/uwito­day/ar­ti­cle10.asp

In ob­ser­vance of World Obe­si­ty Day (11th Oc­to­ber 2018), CARPHA stat­ed that Caribbean women are 3 times like­ly to be obese than men and al­so have high­er rates of ab­dom­i­nal obe­si­ty. Obe­si­ty in­creas­es the risk of de­vel­op­ing non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases (NCDs) such as hy­per­ten­sion, di­a­betes, can­cer and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases.

For­mer pres­i­dent of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB), Luis Al­ber­to Moreno, averred that Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean coun­tries need to in­vest more in sport and phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty to cre­ate health­i­er and hap­pi­er so­ci­eties. Ac­cord­ing to the IDB, spend­ing by gov­ern­ments in Latin Amer­i­can and the Caribbean on sport amounts to .1% of GDP ex­clud­ing elite ath­letes fund­ing.

The IDB re­port not­ed that al­though the re­gion is not­ed for pro­duc­ing world-class elite ath­letes, the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion phys­i­cal in­ac­tiv­i­ty lev­el is very ex­as­per­at­ing es­pe­cial­ly when the pop­u­la­tion is dis­ag­gre­gat­ed in­to age groups. For in­stance, be­tween the ages 11 and 17, on­ly 1 out of 10 ado­les­cents are meet­ing the uni­ver­sal stan­dard of 60 min­utes of mod­er­ate to vig­or­ous ac­tiv­i­ty per day. In T&T, for the pe­ri­od 2007-11, School Health Sur­vey re­port­ed for the age group 12-15 years, more per­sons were seden­tary than phys­i­cal­ly ac­tive for 60 min­utes.

The find­ings and con­cerns raised by the HEU re­port fur­ther re­in­force the sug­ges­tion of CARPHA (2018) fo­cus­ing on food and nu­tri­tion sur­veil­lance sys­tems. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, as this col­umn has re­peat­ed from time to time al­most ad nau­se­um, there is an ur­gent need to gen­er­ate phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty par­tic­i­pa­tion across the pop­u­la­tion es­pe­cial­ly among chil­dren who are cur­rent­ly spend­ing long seden­tary hours in on­line class­es in front of elec­tron­ic de­vices due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic con­trol mea­sures.

A strate­gic ap­proach is re­quired to not on­ly sen­si­tize but al­so get the pop­u­la­tion across age, gen­der, so­cial class, eth­nic­i­ty, dis­abil­i­ty, and re­li­gion in­volved in recre­ation­al phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty. While it is im­por­tant to have the sup­port of or­ga­ni­za­tion­al stake­hold­ers- min­istries such as health, sport, ed­u­ca­tion, com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment; sport­ing bod­ies and the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty- it is equal­ly im­per­a­tive that com­mu­ni­ties are al­lowed to speak about the var­i­ous so­cio-eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al is­sues that im­pact on their ha­bit­u­al en­gage­ment in phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty. Such an ap­proach will al­low for the de­vel­op­ment of re­al­is­tic poli­cies that will have a greater chance of yield­ing re­turns as com­mu­ni­ties would have par­tic­i­pat­ed in the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process that will af­fect their lives.