Study shows 2.1 Billion People in the World are Overweight

[jamesbond]

About 2.1 billion people, or almost one-third of the world’s population, were obese or overweight last year, researchers estimated after examining data from 183 countries.

The estimated number of overweight or obese people almost tripled from 857 million in 1980, according to the analysis published today in The Lancet. The heaviest country was the U.S., accounting for about 13 percent of the world’s obese people, followed by China and India, which together represent 15 percent, according to the study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Since 1980, no country has made significant progress in reducing the rates of people being overweight or obese,â€￾ Christopher Murray, the study author, said in an e-mail. “Obesity is now a major public health epidemic in both the developed and the developing world.â€￾

Obesity can raise the risk of diabetes, osteoarthritis, heart disease and cancer, among other health-threatening conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Being overweight was estimated to have caused 3.4 million deaths worldwide, said Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Worldwide prevalence of obesity and overweight rose by 28 percent for adults and by 47 percent for children from 1980 and 2013, the researchers found. The number of men who were obese over that period time grew to 37 percent from 29 percent, while the number of women rose to 38 percent from 30 percent.

Here is the link for the article:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-2 ... dwide.html

[Cornfed]

This is probably as a result of the declining nutritional quality of food forcing people to eat more calories to get enough nutrients in.