The Prague Post Online: News: Study: Czechs are among Europe's fattest

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Study: Czechs are among Europe's fattest

Unhealthy fare and sedentary habits are to blame for rise in heft

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 2nd, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Prima TV's series Jste to, co jíte (You Are What You Eat) highlights the way ballooning waistlines are becoming increasingly common.

Praguers — especially the women — are known as a preternaturally, inexplicably svelte group despite the standard Czech diet of dumplings, pork and beer.

But all that heavy food, and changing lifestyles, has caught up with Czechs. Studies now show that they are among the heftiest people on the Continent.

Calorie counts

730 cal goulash with six knedlíky, or dumplings, medium plate
156 cal beer (.5 L)
750 cal wiener schnitzel (breaded, fried pork), medium plate
535 cal smoked fatty pork, 100g
696 cal svičková (sirloin, cream sauce) with four dumplings, 100g
447 cal sekaná (meatloaf) with potatoes, 100g
274 cal pizza with ham, 100g
204 cal pepper sausage, 100g
300 cal tlačenka (Czech dish made of pig liver, meat, etc.), 100g
362 cal bábovka (Czech marble cake), 100g
238 cal bramborák (potato pancake) 100g
955 cal vepřo-knedlo-zelo (pork meat, dumplings and sauerkraut), one plate

Sources: www.calorie-count.com, www.zdravystyl.eu, www.zdrava-vyziva.

Czechs are getting fatter for the same reasons that Americans, and now the British, have notoriously enlarged: They eat too much and do too little.

“The Czech people have a high rate of obesity,” said Dr. Vojtěch Hainer, of the Czech Endocrinological Institute in Prague and president of the European Association for the Study of Obesity.

Although studies measuring obesity vary in method from country to country, Hainer said Czechs are usually somewhere between the third to fifth heaviest in Europe. The British tend to lead the pack, and Poland, Germany and Cyprus pull more than their own weight, too.

The thinnest nations are Italy and France, according to the International Association for the Study of Obesity. Scandinavians, who Hainer noted bicycle a lot, tend to be slender, too.

Old habits die hard
More than half of Czech adults are overweight, meaning they have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 25; and about 20 percent are obese, meaning they have a BMI of more than 30. A person’s BMI is his or her weight divided by the square of the person’s height.

It’s not an optimum measure of fat stores, just a “very crude mark of overweight and obesity,” Hainer said.

For example, men tend to have higher BMI than women because of their lean muscle mass, not necessarily because they have more fat.

Children, too, are getting heavier. Hainer said about 10 percent to 20 percent of Czech children are overweight. The reasons for this increase, for both children and adults, are that Czech lifestyle is increasingly sedentary and Czechs tend to consume a lot of fats and sugars. High beer consumption also factors. Hainer has said high alcohol consumption is associated with enlarged fat stores.

Especially since the fall of communism, Czechs have had an increasing variety of food to eat — but, for some, old habits die hard.

Philip James, former chairman of the London-based International Obesity Taskforce, said Central and Eastern Europe rank at the top of middle-aged obesity because communist-era agricultural and food policies focused on producing and eating meat and fat, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The upside of the increased variety is that more people, and especially the young, are eating more fruits and vegetables. The downside is they are also drinking more soda and other sugary drinks and gobbling down snacks, Hainer said. U.S. studies have strongly correlated childhood obesity with the consumption of sugary drinks.

Treatment necessary
The effect of this combination of sloth and gluttony tends to be particularly pronounced outside of cities.

“[Obesity] is much higher in the countryside because they really combine the traditional Czech food with the sedentary lifestyle,” Hainer said.

The young tend to eat less traditionally Czech food, but their sedentary habits mean they are still putting on the kilos.

To fight the nation’s expanding waistline, a number of obesity-treatment centers have been established across the country.

Dr. Marie Kunešová, also of the endocrinological institute, told Radio Prague that there are five centers in the Czech Republic for the treatment of severely obese patients and about 40 obesity outpatient clinics. She has said more people driving is also to blame.

Kunesová put the obesity numbers at 22 percent for men and 25 percent for women and said that a dozen years ago the numbers were 16 percent and 20 percent, respectively. The European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) expects these numbers will rise, as they have in the United States.

Only in a few European countries — the Czech Republic, Georgia and Serbia — are obese patients directed toward specialists for management and treatment, according to the EASO. Treatment is necessary to prevent obesity-related killers such as hypertension and diabetes.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com

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