Education, health sectors join forces to curb student overweight, obesity

Speaking at the seminar, Associate Professor and Doctor Huynh Thi Vu Quynh, Deputy Head of the Department of Pediatrics at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy, said many parents currently refuse to acknowledge that their children are overweight or obese when receiving the results of their children’s health checkups.

According to Associate Professor and Doctor Huynh Thi Vu Quynh, from 2010 to 2025, Vietnam was among the 10 countries worldwide with the fastest growth in the number of overweight and obese children aged 5-19.

Several factors have contributed to the rapid rise in childhood overweight and obesity, including a lack of playgrounds at schools, which limits opportunities for children to engage in regular physical activity; parents’ reluctance to let their children walk or cycle to school due to safety concerns; and inadequate access to healthy diets, as school meals have yet to fully meet nutritional requirements.

Statistics from the Ho Chi Minh City Center for Disease Control under the Department of Health show that in the 2025-2026 school year, 20.4 percent of primary school students were overweight and 18.3 percent were obese. At the secondary level, the corresponding figures were 21.5 percent and 12.1 percent, respectively. At the high school level, 17.4 percent of students were overweight, and eight percent were obese.

In response to the situation, the health sector has set a target of reducing the proportion of overweight and obese children aged 5-18 to below 40 percent by 2030 through measures including standardizing school meals, tightening controls over food sold at school canteens, and increasing physical activity among students.

The Ho Chi Minh City Center for Disease Control recommended that schools conduct screening to detect overweight and obesity among students at an early stage; improve the quality of school meals; strengthen food safety controls at school canteens; promote physical education; and develop a family-school-health sector coordination model to enhance students’ nutrition and physical activity.

To reduce the rate of overweight and obesity among students in Ho Chi Minh City, the Department of Health, the Department of Education and Training, and Novo Nordisk Vietnam, a leading global healthcare company, signed a memorandum of understanding on the “Cities for Better Health" program, aimed at promoting disease prevention measures and improving health literacy among students.

With the signing of the cooperation agreement, Ho Chi Minh City became the first locality in Vietnam and the 57th city worldwide to join the “Cities for Better Health” network.

Under the 2026-2029 cooperation program, key areas of focus include improving health literacy in schools; supporting the implementation of health education activities; providing training for teachers to enhance their awareness, knowledge, and understanding of obesity prevention; and applying digital tools, innovative solutions, and data-driven approaches to support health education, behavior-change communication, and disease prevention among students, thereby improving the quality of school health.