In a historic and deeply troubling shift, childhood obesity has now overtaken underweight as the most prevalent form of malnutrition among school-aged children and adolescents worldwide, UNICEF revealed in a bombshell report released on Thursday.
The 2025 Child Nutrition Report, titled “Feeding Profit: How food environments are failing children”, paints a stark picture of a global health crisis spiraling out of control, driven by unhealthy, ultra-processed foods, aggressive marketing tactics, and weak or absent regulations.
“This dramatic shift jeopardizes the health and future potential of children, communities, and entire nations,” the report warns, pointing to an unchecked rise in overweight and obesity rates among children and teenagers that now rivals or exceeds the traditional burden of undernutrition.
At the heart of the crisis is what UNICEF calls a “toxic food environment” where children are bombarded with cheap, calorie-dense, ultra-processed products and sugary drinks, while healthy, nutritious food remains out of reach for millions.
“Children are growing up in environments where the unhealthy choice is the easiest, the cheapest, and the most heavily promoted,” the report states.
The report pulls no punches in accusing food industry giants of prioritizing profits over children’s health, flooding markets with harmful products, while governments stand largely unprepared or unwilling to push back.
Despite mounting evidence, UNICEF says governments have failed to implement basic safeguards, leaving children dangerously exposed.
“Countries remain largely unprepared to protect children from these harmful food environments,” the report warns, citing a lack of regulation around food marketing, labelling, taxation of unhealthy products, and school nutrition policies.
The report underscores how these trends are hitting poorer communities the hardest, widening health inequalities and locking vulnerable children into cycles of poor health and poverty.
UNICEF lays out eight urgent recommendations to tackle the crisis, including:
Enforcing the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes
Regulating school food environments and advertising
Taxing unhealthy foods and drinks
Supporting local, nutritious food production
Shielding policy-making from food industry interference
Strengthening social protection and youth advocacy
Investing in robust monitoring systems
The agency also called on governments to resist industry influence and act decisively to transform food environments, or risk “losing an entire generation to diet-related disease and early death.”
With the global food industry showing no signs of slowing its push into developing markets, and obesity rates rising in both rich and poor nations alike, UNICEF’s message is clear: The world is at a tipping point.
Unless governments act now, “today’s children will grow up sicker and die younger than their parents — not from lack of food, but from the wrong kind of food.”
