Nearly 30% of South Korean students overweight, with more binge drinking than before

SEOUL - The percentage of South Korean students who are overweight or obese inched down in 2023 compared with the year before, but a growing percentage of students were categorised as heavy drinkers, a government report showed on March 28.

Some 29.6 per cent of elementary, middle and high school students across the country fell into the overweight or obese categories, according to the joint report by the Ministry of Education and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.

This figure marked a slight decrease of 0.9 percentage points from the year before, and a drop of 1.2 percentage points compared with in 2021.

South Korea defines those with a body-mass index (BMI) of between 23 and 24.9 as overweight, and 25 or above as obese.

These definitions are different from the World Health Organisation’s standard, in which a BMI of between 25 and 29.9 is defined as overweight, and a BMI of 30 or higher is defined as obese.

Officials conducted the study based on a survey of 87,182 students at 1,009 schools across South Korea.

The survey showed that students living in rural areas – administrative areas categorised as “eup” or “myeon” – had a higher rate of being overweight or obese at 34.4 per cent, compared with 28.7 per cent for those living in urban areas.

The report showed that the average weight of students in their final year of high school has inched up – the weight of boys went up 0.9kg to 72.7kg, while that of girls increased 0.7kg to 58.2kg.

Male students in the final year of middle school weighed more than in the prior year, but girls weighed less, with boys hitting 64.6kg and girls 55.1kg.

However, the weights of both sixth grade boys and girls decreased, with that of boys falling by 1kg to 50.6kg, and that of girls by 0.2kg to 47kg.

The government also surveyed the smoking and drinking rates of students in middle and high schools; the smoking rate refers to the percentage of those who had smoked at least once in the past 30 days, and the drinking rate refers to students who had at least one drink in the same period. The combined smoking rate was 4.2 per cent, down 0.3 per cent from the year before.

By gender, it was 5.6 per cent for males, down 0.6 percentage points compared with in 2022, and 2.7 per cent for females, the same as in 2022.

The drinking rate for both boys and girls dropped from the year before, from 15 per cent to 13 per cent for boys, and from 10.9 per cent to 9 per cent for girls.

But while the report showed that fewer students overall are drinking alcohol, those who do are drinking a lot.

Of those categorised as drinkers, the percentage of those who did “dangerous drinking” – which the study defines as boys having five shots or more of soju and girls having three shots or more of soju at least once in the past 30 days – was 41.3 per cent for boys and 50.1 per cent for girls. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK