The global obesity epidemic continues its staggering rise. In just over 30 years, obesity rates worldwide have more than doubled among adults, and quadrupled among children and adolescents. More than a billion people are now obese – that's one in eight. This is the main finding of a vast study published by The Lancet, on Friday, 1 March, three days before World Obesity Day. It's a pathology associated with numerous complications (including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer) and which, along with being overweight, is the fifth leading cause of death worldwide. According to the British scientific journal, 879 million adults and 159 million children and adolescents were obese in 2022, compared with 195 million and 31 million, respectively, in 1990.
Women account for the majority of adults affected (504 million, or 57%), but it is among men that the trend has progressed fastest in 30 years: For them, prevalence has almost tripled, while it has doubled in women. Among children, obesity mainly affects boys (94 million, or 59%), and the rise in prevalence is comparable between the sexes – by a factor of four for girls and 4.4 for boys.
The authors, from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration – an international network for the study of non-communicable diseases – estimated trends in obesity and being underweight based on more than 3,600 studies covering 197 countries. In line with the World Health Organization (WHO), they define obesity in adults as a body mass index (BMI, weight divided by height squared) greater than 30. They acknowledge that BMI is not an ideal indicator, as it does not account for fat proportion and distribution in the body, but point out that it is widely used, enabling comparisons between countries.
Being underweight is characterized by a BMI below 18.5. While it is one of the manifestations of undernutrition, it is not the most commonly used indicator to measure food insecurity. However, it does enable the illustration of the dual burden of malnutrition using the same databases.
'The world's problem'
"We expected to reach the figure of one billion [obese people] in 2030, but it has arrived much earlier than we have anticipated," said Francesco Branca, director of WHO's nutrition and food safety department, on Thursday, February 29, at a press conference presenting the data. Branca explained that different forms of malnutrition coexist within countries, communities or families, and a child first affected by underweight may later be affected by obesity, generally highlighting a "lack of access to a healthy diet."
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