Kathmandu, Aug. 8 -- When Tina Moffat returned to Nepal in 2019 after two decades, she was shocked.

It was not the sight of gleaming shopping malls towering above roads widened to the size of boulevards, where thousands of new vehicles jockeyed for space. It was the sheer number of overweight and obese Nepali children she noticed.

'This was not something I ever saw in Kathmandu in the 1990s,' writes Moffat, associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Her research at the end of the 20thcentury focused on children in the families of carpet weavers living on the outskirts of the capital. Since then her academic interest has broadened to include how children worldwide are fed, which is reflected in her ne...