Obesity Status of Children from 4 to 7 Years of Age in the Commune of Arica: A Comparative Study according to Gender

Obesity remains to be a global health problem. Chile has been affected by the high prevalence of obesity in the infant population. Obesity is shown interchangeably at early ages, being necessary to investigate this behavior in age groups of 4 to 7 years. To this end, a general objective has been set: to evaluate the nutritional status, from the anthropometric point of view, of children from 4 to 7 years of age in the district of Arica, carrying out a non-experimental, quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive-comparative study. As a result, it was found that there weren’t statistically significant differences in the prevalence of obesity and overweight among girls and boys, although girls showed values of body mass index and percentage of fat mass discretely higher than boys and, the obesity increase was directly proportional to age. *Address for correspondence: Luis Antonio Barrio Mateu Ofragia 65, Las Palmas II, Arica, Chile Phone: +56951966235, E-mail: lbm170161@gmail.com INTRODUCTION Obesity continues to be a topic of scientific interest, especially because despite all the actions taken by different governments and countries, high levels of obesity continue to be recorded worldwide, both in adults and infants. The World Health Organization (WHO) (2016) highlights that the number of infants and young children (from 0 to 5 years) suffering from overweight or obesity increased from 32 million in 1990 to 41 million in 2016. Only in the African Region, the number of overweight or obese children increased from 4 to 9 million in the same period. In developing countries with emerging economies, the prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity in pre-school children exceeds thirty percent. In Chile, childhood obesity has also increased, which was reflected in the results of the System of Measurement of the Quality of Education (SIMCE) 2016. In the area of Physical Education, 9568 eighth grade primary education children in 309 establishments were evaluated, revealing a worrying physical state of Chilean schoolchildren. According to these results, forty-five percent of the students were overweight or obese, which implies an increase of four percentage points, compared to previous studies released by this same entity. The prevalence of obesity has been shown indiscriminately regarding sex. In a study conducted in the United States by Wang (2011), it is estimated that between 1988-1994 and 2007-2008, men had a faster increase in the prevalence of