The global obesity epidemic continues its dizzying rise. In just over thirty years, the obesity rate across the world has more than doubled for adults, and quadrupled among children and adolescents. More than a billion people are obese today, or one in eight. This is the main result of a large study published by The Lancet, Friday 1er March, three days before World Obesity Day, a pathology associated with numerous complications (type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancers, etc.) and which, with excess weight, is the fifth cause of death in the world. According to the British scientific journal, 879 million adults and 159 million children and adolescents were obese in 2022; in 1990, they were 195 million and 31 million respectively.
Women represent the majority of adults affected (504 million, or 57%), but it is among men that the trend has progressed the fastest in thirty years: for them, the prevalence has almost tripled, while it doubled among women. Among children, obesity mainly affects boys (94 million, or 59%) and the increase in prevalence is comparable between the sexes – factor 4 for girls and 4.4 for boys.
The authors, from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration – an international network for the study of noncommunicable diseases – estimated the evolution of trends in obesity and 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 recognize that BMI is not an ideal indicator, as it does not take into account the proportion and distribution of fat in the body, but emphasize that it is widely used, which allows comparisons between countries.
Underweight is characterized by a BMI of less than 18.5. If it is one of the manifestations of undernutrition, it is not the most used indicator to measure food insecurity, but it allows, from the same databases, to illustrate the double burden of malnutrition.
“A worldwide problem”
“We expected to reach the figure of a billion [de personnes obèses] in 2030, but it arrived much faster,” said Francesco Branca, the director of the WHO Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, Thursday, February 29, during a press conference presenting this data. “Different forms of malnutrition coexist within countries, communities or families, and a child first affected by underweight can then be affected by obesity,” he clarified, generally emphasizing a “lack of access to healthy diets”.
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