Obesity has become the most common form of malnutrition, says WHO
A study conducted by the UN World Health Organization and published in The Lancet found that more than 1 billion people, or one in eight, are obese, a problem that has already spread beyond rich countries. In Latin America – especially in the Caribbean – the percentage of obese and extremely thin people, another scourge, has increased.
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This Friday, March 1, a report from the World Health Organization, published by the specialist medical journal Lancet, updated data on the level of malnutrition in the world, reaching the alarming conclusion that one in eight people is obese, the equivalent of more than 1 billion citizens.
The study collected data from more than 190 countries and was produced in collaboration with Imperial College London.
The text also states that obesity in children and adolescents has quadrupled from 1990 to 2022, while it has doubled in adult women and tripled in men. Detailed estimates show that two years ago, about 159 million children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 were obese.
Imperial College professor Majid Ezzati said it was “very worrying” that the “epidemic” of obesity, which “was evident among adults in much of the world in the 1990s, is now also affecting children and teenagers.”
Against the background of a decrease in the proportion of minors suffering from underweight (children who weigh less than their age according to WHO criteria), Obesity remains the most common form of malnutrition in most countries..
However, Francesco Branca, director of WHO’s Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, wanted to emphasize that “undernutrition and obesity are two sides of the same problem – lack of access to healthy food.”
According to Branca, malnutrition particularly affects regions such as East Africa or South Asia, where it is often a source of other diseases. Meanwhile, obesity leads to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes or various types of cancer.
Malnutrition in Latin America
One of the features of this study is that it shows that obesity has increased rapidly in less industrialized countries, such as Asia or Latin America.
“Only a few countries have managed to maintain indicators at the level of 30 years ago. But overall there is significant growth in both high-income and low-income countries, we are seeing significant growth in North Africa, the Middle East, South America and the Pacific Islands,” Branca said.
The countries with the highest prevalence of obesity (a measure of the total number of people in a given group who have or have had a particular disease) are the Pacific and Caribbean archipelagos.
In 50 countries (25% of the sample), obesity increased more among women, and in 41 countries (21%) – among men. Of these countries where obesity became the predominant disease, the majority were in the Middle East and Caribbean.
While Branca stressed that the prevalence is still very high in highly developed countries such as the US and China, the highest rates are found in the Pacific Islands and South America, where malnutrition had already reached very high levels in the 1990s.
In collaboration with EFE and Reuters