The small town of Seinäjoki in Ostrobothnia, with 60,000 inhabitants, claims in documents on its website and in interviews with international media that it has managed to halve the proportion of overweight children, including those between the ages of five and 11, with a method that has protected its name and calls it “Healthy Children of Seinäjoki”.
Delegations from a dozen countries including Swedes visited the city to learn from their world record. Seinäjoki's method has been copied in South Korea and several Finnish municipalities, among others, to reduce childhood obesity. It is about coordinating school, care and welfare, so that children eat healthier and exercise more.
But researchers from Uppsala University, together with the Finnish health authority THL and a doctor in Seinäjoki, have now discovered that the statistics are misleading. There was no halving of childhood obesity between 2009 and 2016, as claimed; the levels, on the other hand, have remained stable, says Professor Peter Bergsten in Uppsala.
– Absolutely no halves of excess weight, but they are small movements based on what is essentially a horizontal curve over time.
The statistics that the World Health Organization highlighted in an article five years ago are based on about ten children, but when the weight and height of all thousands of children are scientifically analyzed, the effect disappears.
Vetenskapstradin, together with YLE, requested the statistics from Seinäjoki and THL without success. But the chief doctor Arja Lassila in Seinäjoki, who took part in the analysis, confirms that the children's obesity did not drop by the claimed 50 percent.
– We know it's not minus 50, maybe people will say: what have you done? Did you lie to the whole world about this? But I don't think they did it, but they achieved these results and they did their best, says Arja Lassila.
Arja Lassila points out that it is the municipality of Seinäjoki that itself commissioned the scientific assessment of childhood obesity, which is expected to be published at the city's international annual conference at the end of March this year.
A longer report on how the city that was considered the best in the world at reducing childhood obesity is now losing its record will be shown today on Vetenskapstradin Hälsa.
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