Obesity

The report releases recently observed that obesity stood at 46 percent in 2016.

According to findings of the report, the high rate of adult obesity observed in Samoa (almost 46 per cent in 2016) points to access to an amount of dietary energy, which is well above the minimum amount of dietary energy needed by the population to be in good health and to be socially active.

Furthermore, the survey results are confirmed by the high number of deaths caused by non-communicable diseases (N.C.D.s) in Samoa.

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.

The bank has offered to fund research, which would enable data collection to help the government improve its taxation policy on tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food.

Lifestyle diseases are a major problem in Samoa with diabetes, heart disease, and strokes now accounting for almost half of all deaths.

Samoa also has one of the highest obesity rates in the Pacific at 54 per cent, while obesity rates among Samoan women are 66 per cent.

The World Health Organisation says those rates have increased in Samoa over the last decade.

“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.