To tackle the nation's growing rates of obesity, Samoa must also turn to the environment that is facilitating unhealthy living and making it difficult to lose weight a top medical researcher says.

In a presentation to the National University of Samoa, Toleafoa Dr. Viali Lameko said his data showed approximately 45 per cent of Samoan men and 69 per cent of Samoan women were overweight or obese.

In explaining the data he uses the term “obesogenic environment” to refer to “an environment that promotes gaining weight and one that is not conducive to weight loss” within the home or workplace. 

In other words, the obesogenic environment refers to an environment that helps, or contributes to, obesity.

He explained that the clinical definition of obesity (body mass index or B.M.I.) had been amended to allow for typically greater muscle mass in Polynesian people than other ethnic groups.

However, even with this adjustment, the prevalence of obesity in Samoa is a major public health issue.

Obesity is a risk factor for diabetes, heart disease and stroke, kidney disease, which are among the leading causes of disability and causes of death in Samoa.   

For the past thirty years or more public health efforts to reduce obesity have tried to encourage individual behavior change – messages for people to eat healthy food and exercise more. Yet the rates of obesity have continued to rise. 

“Blaming individual behavior and trying to change it is not enough,” Dr. Lameko said. 

Toleafoa described the many structural factors driving obesity including globalization, trade and economic policy, urbanization poverty, and many others.  

One of those factors is that many sugary, fatty or non-nutritious foods and drinks are cheaper than fresh local foods, and their consumption is promoted by advertising.  Another is that modern lifestyles discourage physical exercise such as walking.    

“Addressing this problem will require a multi-sectoral approach because the Ministry of health cannot tackle it alone.” 

It will require policy measures that could be unpopular, he said, such as restriction on advertising junk food, or economic policies such raising taxes on sugar and sugary foods  and using the revenue to combat obesity by subsidizing  producers of fresh local foods,  or providing walkways on seawalls in rural areas and better footpaths beside roads.

To tackle obesity and associated diseases, Samoa needs to re-examine public policies and realise that people’s behavior is driven by more than the choices they make as individuals. 

According to the World Health Organization, obesity is the abnormal or excessive fat accumulation in adipose tissue of the human body that may impair health. Using the body mass index (BMI: calculated as a person’s weight in KG, divided by the height in meters: kg/m2 ). Obesity is someone’s BMI of more than 30 kg/m2.

Obesity prevalence for 2021 is projected to reach 59 per cent for men and 81 per cent for women. People living in the Pacific Island Countries (P.I.C.) overall have some of the highest rates of obesity in the world today. 

More than 60 per cent of adults in Nauru, American Samoa, Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau and Tonga, are obese today.