Worldwide increases in urbanization with accompanying changes in patterns of dietary intake and energy expenditure have been implicated as the primary ecological drivers of the “obesity pandemic”. Public health organizations try to adopt strategies to combat excess weight gain. These strategies will include reduction of energy intake and an increase of physical activity, but understanding of how both environmental factors contribute to excess weight gain at the population level is an essential prerequisite.
Lower prevalence of obesity in most developing compared with industrialized societies led to the assumption that energy expenditure differs between populations. We assumed that populations in developing countries have lower activity energy expenditure than in industrialized societies where people have more labor-saving devices, but there is little objective evidence to support this assumption. A lot of debate still exists in the literature on this topic and the lack of firm evidence likely comes from that fact that most studied populations had already finished their epidemiological transition numerous decades ago.
Peuls in Senegal living close to the Great Green Wall are known to engage impressive amount of daily physical activities to follow their herds and to have very low body mass indexes. The GGW acts as a catalyzer of the transition from ultra-rural to medium-rural environments with an ultimate transition to urban conditions in Dakar. The objective of the project is to investigate the Peuls population around the GGW on real time the changes induced by an epidemiological transition on physical activity and its consequences on body mass.