Obesity rates rise substantially worldwide

The number of overweight and obese people worldwide is now over 2.1 billion, up from 857 million in 1980, a new analysis has shown, representing a 28% increase among adults and a 47% increase among children.1

The Global Burden of Disease Study 2013, published in the Lancet, showed that in the developed world men had higher obesity rates than women, whereas the opposite was true in developing countries. Obesity is classified as a body mass index of 30 kg/m² or higher, and overweight as a body mass index of 25 kg/m² or higher.

The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, showed that the greatest gain in overweight and obesity worldwide had happened from 1992 to 2002, mainly in people aged 20 to 40. The team of international researchers wrote that, not only was obesity increasing, but no national success stories had occurred in the past 33 years. They said that obesity had become a major global health challenge and called for urgent global action and leadership to help countries intervene more effectively.

Over the past three decades the highest rises in obesity levels among women were in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Honduras, and Bahrain. The highest rises among men were in New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The study noted that in Tonga more than half of all men and women were now classed as obese and that levels of obesity now exceeded 50% of women in Kuwait, Kiribati, the Federated States of Micronesia, Libya, Qatar, Tonga, and Samoa.

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in childhood has increased markedly in developed countries—from 17% in 1980 to 24% in 2013 in boys, and from 16% to 23% in girls over the same period. In developing countries rates have risen from about 8% to 13% in boys and girls over the past three decades.

More than half of the world’s 671 million obese people live in one of 10 countries: the US, China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan, and Indonesia. The US accounted for 13% of obese people worldwide in 2013. Currently, 62% of the world’s obese people live in developing countries.

One positive message from the analysis was that since 2006 the increase in adult obesity in developed countries had slowed down. Some evidence also showed that obesity in more recent birth cohorts was lower than in previous birth cohorts at the same age. The authors said that this provided some hope that the epidemic might have peaked in developed countries and that populations in other countries might not reach the very high obesity rates of over 40% reported in some developing countries.

The study leader, Emmanuela Gakidou of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, said, “Our analysis suggests that the [United Nations’] target to stop the rise in obesity by 2025 is very ambitious and is unlikely to be achieved without concerted action and further research to assess the effect of population-wide interventions, and how to effectively translate that knowledge into national obesity control programmes. In particular, urgent global leadership is needed to help low and middle income countries intervene to reduce excessive calorie intake, physical inactivity, and active promotion of food consumption by industry.”