Obese adults now outnumber underweight people, study finds

More adults worldwide are classified as obese than underweight, according to new research that reveals that the number of obese people in 186 countries has risen from 105 million to more than 640 million over the past four decades.

According to BBC News and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, scientists at Imperial College London and a team of colleagues compared body mass index (BMI) among nearly 20 million adult males and females between 1975 and 2014, and found what lead author Professor Majid Ezzat referred to as an “epidemic of severe obesity” that required action from regulators.

The researchers found that obesity rates in men had more than tripled, from 3.2 percent in 1975 to 10.8 percent in 2014, while they had doubles in women, from 6.4 percent to 14.9 percent. That means that 266 million men and 375 million women were obese as of 2014, and if these trends continue, more than 20 percent of all adults will be clinically obese by the year 2025.

“Our research has shown that over 40 years we have transitioned from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” Ezzat, whose paper detailing the findings was published last week in The Lancet, told BBC News. “Global obesity has reached crisis point.”

Affordable fruits, veggies, grains could help solve the problem

The study found that the average weight of the world’s population has grown an estimated 3.3 pounds per decade since 1975, and the Ezzat said that unless things change, there is “close to zero” chance of meeting the World Health Organization’s global obesity target of returning to 2010 global obesity levels by 2025.

The researchers believe that the increased access to cheaper but less healthy food in some parts of the world is one of the major reasons for the world’s growing waistline. As Ezzati explained to the Post-Gazette, as more country emerge from poverty, they find it easier to consume highly processes carbohydrates, with are often less expensive than whole grains or fresh fruit and vegetables.

“We hope these findings create an imperative to shift responsibility from the individual to governments and to develop and implement policies to address obesity,” Ezzati told BBC News. “For instance, unless we make healthy food options like fresh fruits and vegetables affordable for everyone and increase the price of unhealthy processed foods, the situation is unlikely to change.”

The research also discovered that China and the US have the highest numbers of obese adults in the world. China has 43.2 million obese men and 46.4 million obese women, while there are 41.7 million obese men and 46.1 million women in America. Nearly one-fifth of the all obese adults in the world live in six high-income, English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.

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