Abstract

Aims: Obesity  is  an  issue  that  affects  all  levels  of  society  with  high  rates  of  childhood  obesity increasing in developing countries, due to poor meal quality, lack of awareness and physical inactivity.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study conducted on 28 children over the age of six. The main objectives of the study are to assess their weights using anthropometric measurementas and to evaluate their eating habits and lifestyles using an interview based questionnaire.

Results: The  results  show  that  50%  of  the  children  are  overweight  or  obese,  with significantly low to medium awareness of nutrition, and high consumption of sweets and sugary drinks.

Conclusions: Our findings confirm that eating habits and poor lifestyles contribute to obesity and weight, which suggests that further research should be conducted on children via schools to identify the factors associated with obesity in both children and adolescents in Saudi Schools and design health promoting programmes accordingly.

Keywords

obesity, children, nutrition, food consumption, lifestyles, eating habits, childhood obesity