A massive study of populations around the world has revealed that obesity, not hunger, is putting global health in peril.
Researchers from the United Kingdom have found that over the past three decades, the number of people — both children and adults — considered to be clinically obese has risen to over 1 billion. In contrast, the number of people deemed underweight has dropped to under 550 million.
Obesity is defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher, and it substantially increases a person’s risk of various negative health outcomes. As reported by The Dallas Express, excess weight has been connected to a heightened risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, cancer, dementia, infertility, and more.
The new study, the findings of which were published in The Lancet on February 29, leveraged data collected between 1990 and 2022 on the height and weight of 222 million people living in nearly 200 countries and territories. The research team used the data to generate representative samples of the global population from 1990 to 2022 to determine the prevalence of people being underweight or obese.
There are three main takeaways from the study, which was conducted in partnership with the World Health Organization. The first is that the leading cause of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity, not hunger. The second is that obesity rates are now higher in poorer countries than in richer ones. The third is that childhood obesity rates have quadrupled across the world.
Honing in on the last point, while 31 million children were obese in 1990, an estimated 160 million were so in 2022.
“It is very concerning that the epidemic of obesity that was evident among adults in much of the world in 1990 is now mirrored in school-aged children and adolescents,” said Majid Ezzati, the senior author of the paper and chair of global environmental health at Imperial College London, according to a Lancet news release.
“At the same time, hundreds of millions are still affected by undernutrition, particularly in some of the poorest parts of the world. To successfully tackle both forms of malnutrition, it is vital we significantly improve the availability and affordability of healthy, nutritious foods,” he added.
Similar trends have been apparent in the United States for quite some time, with the CDC releasing data showing that 1 in 5 American adults was obese in 2022.
In Texas, the condition has made significant gains over the past few years, with 35.5% of adults and 17% of children between the ages of 10 and 17 estimated to be obese.