The problem of overweight and obesity in childhood and adolescence. A look from Bioethics

Abstract

The prevention, diagnosis and treatment of overweight and obesity, have bioethical components that, in the authors’ opinion, have not deserved sufficient analysis. In childhood and adolescence this approach has different characteristics than in adulthood, which makes a specific analysis necessary. This paper aims to identify the most important bioethical components of this health problem at these ages, to introduce them into public consideration, and to make some initial contributions to its analysis, which do not attempt to exhaust the topic. To focus on its importance, it reviews the indexes that define overweight and obesity in childhood and adolescence, prevalence in Latin America, Uruguay and the World, and the requirements for food and physical activity for them. Then, it analyzes the responsibilities that ethics assigns to the various social actors (parents, educators, health professionals, producers and marketers of food and the State) in these two matters, lists the ethically desirable actions that derive from those responsibilities, points out the existence of factors that circumscribe them to the scopes of the possible and the achievable, and contrasts them with some examples of ethically reprehensible actions that are observed in practice. The work ends with an inventory of what it has been done in Uruguay in this area and with the analysis of the extent to which it conforms to what ethics marks.