KARACHI: Nutrition experts on Thursday asked the government to impose a `nutrition emergency` to tackle obesity, childhood stunting and anaemia in the country.

`Pakistan is facing extreme disparities in the area of nutrition; it stands 9th in the number of obese or overweight people in the world while ironically, around 45 per cent children here are `stunted` and 50pc women are anaemic or malnourished,` expert nutritionist and dietician and president of the Pakistan Nutrition and Dietetic Society (PNDS) Fayza Khan said at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club.

She said there were around 10 million overweight children in Pakistan while around half of Pakistani children were stunted or undernourished.

`This condition demands immediate attention of the federal and provincial governments and requires imposition of nutrition emergency in the country.

Dr Nilofer Safdar, director of nutritional sciences at the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS), and otherPNDS leaders, including Saima Rasheed and Dr Salma Badruddin, demanded immediate establishment of a nutrition council in the country to tackle the issue of childhood stunting, childhood obesity, anaemia among women and diet-related diseases.

They criticised the so-called `instructors`, who were advising on diet and nutrition-related issues on electronic media and urged the authorities to ban `nutritional quacks`, saying that they were not qualified to deal with that sector of healthcare.

`The government should immediately ban all such programmes on electronic media in which quacks and cooks are advising people what to eat and what not to eat. Nutrition is a highly specialised field and not even medical doctors are trained enough to speak on the issue of diet and nutrition,` said Ms Khan, adding that due to wrong advice, those quacks were playing with the lives of people.

They said Pakistan faced extreme shortage of trained and qualified nutritionists and dieticians and urged the Higher Education Commission to immediately launch degree courses in the field of nutrition and dietetics so that qualifiedprofessionals could help people overcome the national issues of malnourishment, obesity and stunting.

The nutritionists and dieticians said they dedicated the current month to nutrition as every week they would hold awareness activities on different aspects of diet for prevention of diabetes, hypertension, kidney diseases and issues of public health, including diarrhoea and dysentery.

According to them, obesity had emerged as the `mother of all diseases` and if not controlled, millions of youngsters in Pakistan would be in the grip of deadly non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart ailments, renal failure, blindness and stroke.

Similarly, undernourishment in the undeveloped areas especially arid and desert areas of Pakistan was another serious issue where mothers and inf ants were dying regularly due to weak immune systems, frequent infections and poor hygienic conditions, they said.

They urged the media to play their role in creating awareness among the masses of importance of nutrition and how their diet could prevent them from lethal noncommunicable diseases.