Obesity

Being overweight in a Pacific family often means you're guaranteed to be caught in the crossfire of digs, jokes and comments from family members about your weight.

It's a feeling Samuel Sooupu Nanai​ knew all too well, and started him on a dramatic journey to lose weight.

"Growing up I've always been big, every year when we would meet up for Christmas my cousins would call me and my other cousin, fat.​

"I had enough of negative talk especially from family members," says Nanai.

He believes Pasifika need to be careful with how they use their words.

The World Health Organization says children's health is being damaged as well as their brain development and social skills.

It says failing to take the recommended hour a day of exercise is a universal problem in rich and poor countries.

Boys were more active than girls in all but four of the 146 countries studied.

What exercise counts?

Pretty much anything that makes the heart beat more quickly and the lungs breathe harder.

It could include:

The chief executive of Auckland's South Seas Healthcare, Lemalu Silao Vaisola-Sefo, said about 14 percent of Pacific adults in New Zealand are obese - a number that remains stubbornly high.

Lemalu said there should be more discussion about the social factors impacting Pasifika families - such as housing, gambling and poverty.

"It's not just a health problem. Health is important, but you need to look at income and safety and security and everything else. It requires a whole lot of groups including families to come together and actually have one main goal.

“I’m so worried for my life because I know I’m too heavy,” he tells SBS Dateline. “I’m so worried because I really love my wife and my kids and my family.”

Tavita is from Apia, the capital of Samoa, where there is an obesity crisis.

A former taxi driver, he would drink two litres of sugary soft drinks each day and regularly eat mutton flaps, a cheap cut of fatty meat imported from New Zealand.

Did you know when our bodies are exposed to cold over time, they actually start to change to keep themselves warm?

"We start to build up a tissue ... that we call brown adipose tissue — so brown fat," Dr Dino Premilovac from the University of Tasmania said.

"It's more muscle-like than it is fat-like in what it does.

"If we expose our bodies to the cold environment, the way our bodies deal with it over a long period of time is to produce more brown fat."

Brown fat's purpose in the body is to produce heat to warm up the blood, in turn keeping the body warm.

Scientists at Monash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute believe they have found a mechanism in the brain that coordinates the conversion of food into white fat or brown fat in the body.

The study was conducted on mice, but evidence suggests it would likely apply to humans as well.

White fat is how humans store energy, and excess storage leads to obesity, while brown fat actually produces heat and burns energy.

Professor Bruce Neal from the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney reviewed more than 34,000 packaged foods with health-star ratings.

These are the voluntary front-of-pack labels, designed to help people make healthier choices.

But health experts said naturally occurring sugars found in fruits, vegetables and dairy were treated the same as sugars added during food processing.

A recent study found that more than 2 billion adults and children globally are overweight or obese and suffer health problems because of that -- but this is nothing new.

But increasingly, there is a new concern.

It is estimated about half of Australian women are entering pregnancy overweight or obese, with many putting on excessive weight while pregnant.

Jane Raymond, manager of Maternity and Newborn in NSW Health, said weight gain tends to be cumulative and lasting during child-bearing years..

"Pregnancy now is called an independent risk factor for obesity," Ms Raymond said.

Increasingly, research is linking a pregnant mum's weight to the health of her child.

In an article to be published in the PLOS (Public Library of Science) Magazine, modelling by the university's Centre for Public Health Policy concludes that taxing foods that are high in sugar, salt and saturated fats — as well as subsidising fruit and vegetables — would also save $3.4 billion in healthcare costs.

"The study suggests that taxes and subsidies on foods and beverages can potentially be combined to achieve substantial improvements in population health and cost savings to the health sector," the article reads.