Nairobians are starting to fight obesity

The Standard Newspaper published a timely article on 7th April, 2017 titled “how Nairobians fight to bring the scales down” (link: https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001235433). This is a positive step towards shedding much needed light in the fight against Obesity – a growing problem amongst the urban community of Nairobi.

The article states that data from the Kenya Demographic & Health Survey report of 2008-09 showed that Nairobi as a province weighed the most out of all provinces in Kenya. Forty one per cent of women in Nairobi, according to the survey, were either overweight or obese compared to 34.9% in Central Province and 29.3% in Coast province. The US National Centre for Biotechnology Information estimates that 55.3% of Kenyans in the urban areas are either overweight or obese compared to 20.9% of people living in the rural areas. One of the reasons given in the article for this growing problem is the mushrooming of fast food outlets that has occurred over the last 10 years.
Dr. Vladimir Shchukin weighed in on this matter as a Bariatric Surgeon working in Nairobi to provide safe and effective medical weight loss solutions to the people of Kenya. “When our team (comprising of doctors, dietitians, psychotherapists and physical educators) assessed Joyce we concluded that she was a good candidate for a gastric sleeve procedure”, he says. Joyce had previously attempted to lose weight through dieting and exercises but had not been successful at achieving her ideal weight.

The Gastric Sleeve procedure is a minimally invasive laparoscopic technique that reduces the expanded stomach size of a patient back to the normal size like that of a person with a normal, ideal weight. In the three months following her surgery treatment, Joyce had lost 19kg.
Before 2010, there were hardly any patients eligible for bariatric procedures. Today, Dr. Shchukin can have at least 5 surgeries scheduled every month. The reason surgical interventions are becoming more prevalent in the world in the fight against obesity, is because these techniques not only give the patient an opportunity to permanently lose weight, but it has also proven to be very effective in decreasing and eliminating diabetes, high blood pressure and other comorbidities caused by obesity. Comorbidities are the various non-communicable illnesses that obesity and being over weight can set off in a person. Other include heart disease, cancer, arthritis, infertility and stroke.

As the statistics stand, 55% of the Kenyan urban population is overweight or obese; around 18% of the general population of Kenya is underweight. We can see that urban Kenyans are beginning to suffer from the effects of obesity and the non-communicable diseases that it comes with. Even though there is a growing problem at hand, there are also medical, healthy, lasting solutions provided by Holistic Living that are all about helping you regain and maintain your ideal weight for your ideal life.
By C. Njuguna