Obesity is a growing health issue not only in a few developed countries like it was several decades ago, but it is posing a threat to the entire world. A new research that studied obesity rates in 188 countries for 33 years says that almost 30 percent of the global population, or 2.1 billion people, is now either obese or overweight.
Researchers conducted what they call “the most comprehensive” study to date on the global epidemic of obesity, looking at information on 188 nations during a period of 33 years. They found that from 857 million in 1980, the number of people having excess weight, increasing to the whooping 2.1 billion in 2013. Global obesity in adults increased 28 percent, while in children there was a jump of 47 percent. Published Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet, the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013, concluded that there is sharp increase in obesity epidemic in both men and women, and
in both rich and poor countries.
According to the researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington-Seattle, most of the overweight and obese people of the world live actually in the developed countries. Leading nations in terms of obesity prevalence are in the Middle East and North Africa, Central America, and the Pacific and Caribbean islands. The greatest increase in obesity rates in women was reported in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Honduras, and Bahrain, while the steepest rises in men was in New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the united States.
In some countries obesity prevalence is even exceeding 50 percent. More than half of the men in Tonga are overweight and the same could be said for women in Kuwait, Kiribati, Micronesia, Libya, Qatar, Samoa, and Tonga.
While only 13 percent of boys and girls in developing countries are overweight or obese, 22 percent of girls and 24 percent of the boys in developed economies have excess weight. However, according to the statistics, the rates are slowing down for richer countries, while in developed nations, they are accelerating.
Interestingly, the current number of obese people exceeds the total world population in 1927. This was the first time in written history it hit 2 billion. Today, only fat people are 2.1 billion. The problem is most severe in the Middle East and North Africa, where over 58 percent of the men and 65 percent of women are reported overweight or obese. It terms of volumes, the researchers say that more than half of world’s obese live in just 10 countries – the United States, China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
