One Billion People Worldwide Living with Obesity, Study Says
- Pexels/Andres Ayrton
Jakarta – More than one billion adults and children around the world are living with obesity, a new global analysis estimates.
Nearly 880 million adults now are living with obesity, as well as 159 million children, according to the report published February 29 in The Lancet journal.
Obesity rates for kids and teenagers quadrupled worldwide between 1990 and 2022, rising from 1.7% to 6.9% for girls and 2.1% to 9.3% for boys.
Meanwhile, adult obesity rates more than doubled during the same period, researchers found. Obesity increased more than twofold in women (8.8% to 18.5%) and nearly tripled in men (4.8% to 14%).
Ilustrasi obesitas/kegemukan.
- Pexels/Moe Magners
“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 senior study author Majid Ezzatti, chair of global environmental health at Imperial College London, as reported from US News.
These figures outstrip predictions made by the World Obesity Federation, which had predicted that 1 billion people globally would be living with obesity by 2030 in its World Obesity Atlas 2022.
Essentially, the globe had already surpassed that mark by the time of the atlas’ publication, according to the new study.
Obesity is now the most common form of malnutrition in most countries, researchers said.
That’s because the proportion of adults who are underweight declined by more than half between 1990 and 2022, and by one-fifth in girls and more than one-third in boys.
More than 1,500 researchers contributed to the study, which looked at body mass index for more than 220 million people representing more than 190 countries.
In the United States, the obesity rate increased from 11.6% to 19.4% between 1990 and 2022 for girls and from 11.5% to 21.7% for boys.
About 44% of American women and 42% of American men are now obese, up from 21% and 17% two decades earlier, researchers report.
In fact, U.S. men experienced the world's third-greatest increase in obesity rates during those two decades, just behind Romania and Qatar, results show.
