"It takes a village to raise a healthy child"
Every week, paediatrician Edgar van Mil sees children with severe obesity. A fifteen-year-old weighing 150 kilos is no exception. He sees their parents struggling with feelings of guilt and against an environment that piles on the weight. As a professor of Childhood Obesity at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, he wants to help these children and their parents, individually, but above all on a societal and planetary scale.
Children with extreme obesity have a low life expectancy. From a young age, they run a high risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. "More than 60 per cent of our predisposition to overweight is genetically determined. So, it isn't fair to say: you have an obese child, so just try three times as hard. Society as a whole has a part to play here," Van Mil argues. At Jeroen Bosch Hospital in 's-Hertogenbosch, he set up a national expertise centre for children with extreme obesity. He wants to link the work he does there with his work as a professor in the System Earth Science research group in Venlo.
The approach in his centre is broad: alongside medical care, the team looks at the entire family. "What else is going on? It may lie in stress, financial problems, parenting questions and problems at school or within the family. These are families who are struggling on all fronts." His team found inspiration in an African saying: it takes a village to raise a child. You can't raise a child on your own, the whole social environment plays a part."
From small to large
Van Mil studies various factors, including insulin resistance in children with obesity, which is a key contributor to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The composition of your gut bacteria plays a role in preventing insulin resistance. "Fibre-rich and plant-based food promotes a favourable composition. There are indications that organic plant-based food influences gut bacteria even more favourably. If that turns out to be true, you have an extra argument for making our food system more sustainable."
"Everyone sees CO₂ production and temperatures rising and thinks, well, it's all far too big, there's nothing I can do about it," Van Mil acknowledges. "That's precisely why I want to start small: with the child in the consulting room, with their lifestyle and gut bacteria, and from that small level, to make the link with the planet straight away. That way you tackle both problems at once."
The planet as an ally
What makes his chair special, then, is the connection with planetary health. "What we as human beings do is bad for our health and bad for the planet. We eat too much processed food and too much meat, and in doing so we burden nature and the climate. Less meat, more plant-based food, more exercise, it's the obvious way forward." But what about the link between individual health and the planet? "If you help one patient, you're only looking one generation ahead, and future children still will be obese. If you work on sustainable food for everyone, you help generations. Then the link with planetary health is easily made.” According to Van Mil, the connection also yields a practical argument for politicians. "It's easier to convince a government if you can demonstrate that sustainable food genuinely improves children's health." Freely adapting the African saying, he concludes: "It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a country to do it right."
On Friday 6 November 2026 at 4.30 pm, Edgar van Mil will deliver his inaugural lecture at Maastricht University. During this official meeting, he will share more about his plans for the new chair. Click here to follow the lecture live or view it afterwards.
The new chair builds on his earlier chair in Youth, Nutrition and Health, for which Van Mil was appointed professor by special appointment at the same university in 2019.
Text: Patrick Marx
Weight-loss medication
The hype surrounding diabetes drugs that help with weight loss is, according to Van Mil, sometimes necessary, but no miracle cure. "Like fibre-rich food, they make you feel full more quickly. The danger is that your eating pattern doesn't improve. Sometimes we even see people starting to eat less healthily. That's the opposite of what you want to achieve. We believe that with healthy, fibre-rich food you can strengthen the effect of these medicines. We need to research this quickly, especially in children with severe obesity, who often face a very long period of treatment."