It appears that the battle of the bulge is being lost in Canada in all sectors of society. According to Statistics Canada, 500,000 people have become overweight or obese in the last five years, twenty-five percent of whom are children. Nunavut leads the way with 23 percent of the population being obese, while Atlantic Canada comes a close second at 21 percent. The problem is somewhat less pronounced in B.C., Alberta and Quebec.

"We have engineered for ourselves an environment that is toxic to the human body," says Jean-Pierre Depres, spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. "Until we make major changes in the way we live, the prevalence of obesity is going to continue to grow."

Obesity can lead to serious chronic illnesses in adults, including hypertension, stroke, heart disease, diabetes and some cancers, according to Health Canada. Some of these diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, are now showing up in obese children. Childhood obesity has risen so rapidly that Canada now rates on a par with the United States which has the highest prevalence of obesity in the world. Studies show that obese children tend to become overweight or obese adults.

"Our kids are out of shape…at school they are often exposed to a fairly lousy diet. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why our population is getting fatter. The physical fitness of our population has decreased. This is an international trend—obesity is even common in many African countries now."

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that obesity is now at pandemic proportions, and that being grossly overweight may be just as harmful to health as smoking. WHO also states that a sedentary lifestyle may now rank among the 10 main causes of death and disease in the world. At the European Congress on obesity last year in Prague, experts agreed that there has been a substantial increase in obesity in Eastern Europe since the region first started its shift to democracy in 1989, citing the sudden availability of fast food, cars and televisions as a contributing factor.

Dr. William Colmers, Kinesiology Professor at the University of Alberta, believes that acquired bad habits may not be totally to blame for widening waistlines, and says there’s "clearly a genetic component" as to why some people gain weight while others don’t.

"The nerve cells in the hypothalamus are involved in controlling a vast number of things, and eating is part of that. In situations where animals or humans have access to food that is not exceptionally tasty, most people under those conditions maintain a very healthy body weight for most of their lives. What throws a monkey wrench into the works appears to be a sensory component, where something about all this great-tasting food fools us into thinking that we’re not full, so we eat more calories than we need."

Depres suggests providing gyms and showers in the workplace, improving the labeling system on food to help consumers make educated choices when they shop, and having a nutritional program on the curriculum in schools.

"If we end up with a whole population of young Canadians that are obese and sick, what’s the point? We have made our urban environment friendlier to cars than to human beings. We think we’re going to fix this obesity problem, that it’s just a diet thing. It’s the whole environment that we need to re-shape."