According to a major study conducted by the Imperial College London, the number of obese adults in the world has surpassed the number of those who are underweight.
Starting from 1975 and ending in 2014, the team of scientists looked at and compared body mass index (BMI) among nearly 20 million adult men and women. The results were featured in a recent issue of The Lancet.
What lead author Prof Majid Ezzat calls “an epidemic of severe obesity” is, in fact, the modern day plague causing the population to become increasingly more obese. This health-damaging disease has tripled in men and more than doubled in women, according to the results.
For the study, scientists pooled data from 186 countries, revealing that the number of obese people across the world had spiked from “105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014.”
Meanwhile, the number of underweight people had also gone up from “330 million to 462 million” over the same period. In other words, the study’s conclusion is that in 2014, there were 266 million obese men and 375 million obese women worldwide.
This research also shows that there are almost “zero chances” for us to reach the World Health Organization’s global obesity target for 2025; the WHO wants no rise in obesity above 2010 levels.
According to its clinical definition, obesity is represented by an increased BMI – which measures weight in relation to height – of 30 kilograms per meter squared (kg/m2).
While the results of this study might seem good news for the number of underweight individuals, there has been a critical shift in our world over the last 40 years.
Underweight prevalence has been surpassed by obesity, which has prompted Prof Ezzat to call the governments to action and start implementing policies to address obesity.
There isn’t just one solution to the obesity epidemic, but Prof Ezzat believes that making healthy food more affordable while increasing the price of unhealthy processed foods could be one of the answers.
In the meantime, Prof George Davey Smith from the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol believes there can also be an unhealthy focus on the problem of obesity in detriment of “the substantial remaining burden of under-nutrition.”
This could divert significant resources away from disorders that affect the poor and the underweight to those that are statistically more likely to affect the wealthier.
The truth is that while the causes of obesity are complex, we live in a world which encourages low levels of physical activity and poor diets.
Image Source: Think Progress
