Weight-loss surgery and medication are “cornerstones” in tackling obesity, Health Minister Jo Etienne Abela told parliament.
“We want to increase the number of weight loss operations in government hospitals by increasing the staff complement and offering incentives,” he said.
Abela was answering questions by Labour MP Romilda Zarb and Nationalist MP Robert Cutajar on Tuesday. He then provided more details to Times of Malta.
Abela, a surgeon by profession, said: “In our hospitals, we are perhaps not seeing the same number of surgeries as we see abroad. I believe there is more to be done.”
Asked about which specific surgeries he was referring to, Abela mentioned gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy.
A gastric bypass involves dividing the stomach into a small upper pouch and a much larger ‘lower’ remnant pouch, with the small intestine rearranged to connect to both.
Sleeve gastrectomy is a surgical weight-loss procedure where a portion of the stomach is removed, creating a smaller, banana-shaped stomach, reducing food intake and promoting weight loss.
The health minister also said that better nutrition and more exercise are essential in tackling obesity.
“We need an aggressive cross-party national campaign to raise awareness about obesity. We cannot modify our genes but we can change our eating, drinking and exercise habits to avoid unhealthy obesity,” he said.
He said a campaign against obesity needs to be as powerful as “an electoral campaign”.
The minister was speaking hours after the parliamentary public accounts committee discussed a National Audit Office report on obesity. Rebecca Vassallo, who spearheaded the report, told the committee that most of the 2020 goals set in Malta’s obesity policy were not met.
That strategy aimed to reduce the rate of adult obesity from 22 per cent to at least 18 per cent and the pre-obesity rate from 36 per cent to 33 per cent.
While the rate of pre-obese adults has remained stable, the percentage of obese adults “increased substantially”, the report said.
Another target − to reduce child obesity from 32 per cent to 27 per cent − also failed, “and the rate increased significantly from the starting point”, it said.
The NAO report also compares Malta’s obesity rates with other countries through various studies. Malta’s adult population is the most obese in the EU, according to the European Health Interview Survey.
In 2018, the year with the last available data, 28.1 per cent of the adult population was obese.
Malta also had the most obese adolescents, according to another study among 45 countries. With 8.9 per cent of the school-age population reported as obese, Malta’s obesity rate is significantly higher than the second most obese country in the group − Canada, which reported 5.6 per cent of its adolescent population as obese.
Contacted by Times of Malta, PN MP Robert Cutajar said the Nationalist Party had proposed several measures to combat obesity some years ago.
“I hope that they are adopted by the government and the new health minister,” he said.
The measures include a specific number of hours dedicated to physical education as part of school curriculums. He said schools must also be legally obliged to provide healthy food.
Day centres for the elderly should also serve only healthy food, he added.