As Guyana joins the rest of the world in celebrating World Obesity Day, Minister of Health Dr, Frank Anthony is encouraging Guyanese to maintain good health practices such as healthy eating and constant exercise.
The Minister on Friday explained that obesity can lead to a chain of other health-related illnesses.
“It’s good that the WHO would have designated today as World Obesity Day and it’s really important because we know that obesity is a risk for many other diseases so it would increase a person’s risk of dying early, so premature deaths, and it’s a contributor to a number of diseases such as cardiovascular disease, dyslipidemia diabetes for example.
And as your aware, we have in Guyana a lot of persons who would suffer from what we termed as chronic non-communicable diseases and therefore obesity is a risk factor for many of these diseases,” the Minister stated.
He further added that persons should keep track of their weight by conducting regular Body Mass Index (BMI) checks.
“One way of measuring this disease is to do what is called a BMI. A BMI is a Body Mass Index and it’s defined as your in Kilogram divided by your height in square meters and so when you do that calculation, you’ll get a number.”
“Now depending on what that number is you can be classified in different categories, so you could have someone with a normal weight, you can have somebody that is overweight and an overweight person would have a BMI of somewhere between 20 to 25 Kg per meter square, an obese person is defined as someone with a BMI of greater than 30 Kg per meter square and the severely obese person would have a BMI of greater than 40 Kg per meter square,’ the Minister further explained.
He also stated that obese people that contract COVID-19 are at higher risk of being hospitalized by the disease.
“If your obese then you’ll more than likely have all the comorbidities that we keep talking about, you’re probably hypertensive as well, you might be having diabetes and so because of these comorbidities we have been seeing, people with comorbidities having a more severe form of Covid a lot of them requiring hospitalization and in some cases end up in the ICU. So, it is important for persons to start monitoring their BMI levels.”
Meanwhile, Health officials are currently monitoring 342 active cases across the country; 23 new cases have been recorded within the last 24-hour period.
Further information from Dr. Anthony revealed that 433,497 or 84.5 per cent of the adult population have received a first dose of a covid vaccine while 330,026 or 64.3 per cent have received a second dose of the covid vaccines.
For the 12 to 17 age group, 33,661 or 46.2 per cent have received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccines while 24,373 or 33.4 have received both doses.
