The obesity epidemic
Doctors have recognized the United States as the "fattest" country in the world
More than two billion people around the world suffer from excess pounds and extreme forms of obesity, and the main leader in the number of such people is the United States, scientists say in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity in 195 Countries over 25 Years).
"People who do not consider excess weight a problem worthy of attention do so at their own risk, since the risk of developing heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other diseases is growing, not falling. The comic promises to crack down on the kilograms that we make for the New Year should become serious in order to stop this epidemic," Christopher Murray from the University of Washington in Seattle said (in a press release, New study finds more than 2 billion people overweight or obese – VM).
According to WHO data, about a third of the world's population today suffers from obesity, and in some countries, such as Great Britain and the Middle East countries, more than half of the population is overweight. According to current forecasts, the number of people on Earth with extra pounds will reach 2.7 billion by 2025, with the proportion of people with extreme forms of obesity at that time reaching 17%, and the number of overweight people – about 46%.
Murray and his colleagues conducted the first global "census" of overweight people and studied how obesity and related diseases affect life expectancy and the likelihood of premature death.
Within its framework, scientists were able to track how the obesity epidemic spread across 195 countries over the past 45 years and analyze how fluctuations in the number of obese people affected the prevalence of over three hundred diseases and other health problems.
According to scientists, approximately 2.2 billion people in all countries of the world suffered from excess weight in 2015, and their number is constantly growing today. In addition, approximately 100 million children and about 600 million adults suffer from extreme forms of obesity, with the development of which the body mass index exceeds 30 (BMI from 30 to 35 according to the simplified WHO classification is considered not extreme, but the first degree of obesity – BM).
The number of such people, according to Murray and his colleagues, doubled compared to 1980 in 70 countries at once, and has grown markedly in other countries of the world. Approximately four million adults and children die every year due to weight problems and concomitant diseases, and about 40% of them are people who are overweight but not yet obese.
A drawing from an article in NEJM – VM.
Among the 20 most populated countries in the world, the main "leader" in this ranking is the United States – over 13% of young Americans and children and 24% of adults suffer from extreme forms of obesity. In Egypt, there is a record number of adults with extra pounds – more than a third of the population suffers from obesity here.
In India and China, the proportion of such people, on the contrary, was quite modest – about 3 and 5%. The thinnest countries, as scientists have found, are in South and Southeast Asia - only 1% of the inhabitants of Bangladesh and Vietnam suffers from obesity problems. All this, according to Murray, speaks of the need for a coordinated fight against obesity at the UN level, without which it will be impossible to defeat the epidemic of excess weight, according to the doctor.
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13.06.2017