Affecting more than a billion people, cases explode worldwide: Obesity is on the rise dangerously

A billion people. One of the eight. Obesity has become a real phenomenon that is spreading across the planet, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), published on Friday by the medical journal The Lancet, three days before the World Day dedicated to this pathology.

The WHO did not anticipate this threshold before 2030, but obesity rates have doubled in thirty years. The bad: It’s quadrupled in the under-18s.

Boys as children, women as adults

Based on more than 3,600 studies covering 197 countries, the WHO notes that boys are the most affected among children (59%) and adults (54%).

And, according to the authors of the study cited by Le Monde, the evolution of food alone explains part of this acceleration, with a shift “From Subsistence and Local Food to Merchandise”, are rich in calories, such as processed food that harms fresh produce. Low-income countries are particularly affected by this type of malnutrition.

Food is changing

According to The Lancet, France is making progress in this area, with a 2-point drop in obesity among French women (compared to a 4.6-point drop in Spain) and stability among men.

Diets are changing Worldwide, the proportion of adults suffering from malnutrition or underweight has more than halved over the same period.

So much so that most countries now have more overweight people than underweight people. WHO defines obesity in adults as a body mass index (BMI, i.e. weight divided by height squared) greater than 30 (below 18.5, a person’s weight is the opposite).