More People On Earth Now Obese Than Underweight, Says Study (statnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to a new study published in the Lancet, obese people now outnumber the underweight population for perhaps the first time in global history. Majid Ezzati, an environmental health researcher at Imperial College London who led the study, analyzed data from 1975 to 2014 across 19.2 million adults from 186 countries. They found that over the 40-year-span, the proportion of obese men worldwide more than tripled, to roughly 11 percent, and the proportion of obese woman more than doubled, to about 15 percent. Researchers estimate 18 percent of men and 21 percent of women worldwide will be obese by 2025. What some may consider more surprising is that more than 25 percent of the world's severely obese men and almost 20 percent of the world's severely obese women are American. However, the rapid rise of obesity in developing nations is most concerning as it's more difficult for obese people to modify their diet and have access to medication.

Comments

This is a good thing.

[BitterOak]

Although obesity may seem like a problem in developed countries, the fact that there are more obese people than underweight people in the world means that starvation is much less of a problem than it used to be. We now have enough food to feed the world. This is a good thing. Better to be a bit chubby than die of starvation which in some parts of the world, people used to do.

Re:This is a good thing.

[frovingslosh]

That's because a Big Mac is cheaper to buy than groceries.

Really? The problem that I have with such a comment is that you supposedly can't buy a Big Mac with food stamps. So if you are poor then groceries, even nutritious ones, are free, and Big Macs are not. Maybe it is more about being lazy than poor (not that I don't admit that there is a strong correlation). Of course, being lazy can lead to obesity in other ways too.

Re:This is a good thing.

[alvinrod]

While this is certainly true in many places, if you live in the Southern U.S. it's pretty easy to get access to cheap and fresh produce year round. However that does require people to have the time and disposition to cook their own meals. Too many people would just rather scarf down a burger or toss something in the microwave instead of doing some cooking and make the mistake of thinking that a potato still counts as a vegetable after being thinly sliced and fried in oil. Soda is probably the worst offender for most people. A 20 oz. bottle has somewhere between 200 - 300 calories (pretty much all of it from sugar) and I'm sure everyone has known someone who comes close to the daily recommended calorie intake from soda alone.

Re:This is a good thing.

[blindseer]

Ever wonder why cancer rates are up?

No, not really. Cancer rates are up because of all the ways for people to die cancer is one that we haven't figured out yet. Modern farming has allowed us to avoid starvation. Finding out how to make heat and light from coal and oil has made it much less likely to die of food poisoning, freezing, and bumping into wild animals at night. Modern medicine has kept us from dying from industrial accidents, wars, infections, heart attacks, diabetes, and on and on. Electricity, electronics, and school systems educate the masses on nutrition, how to safely cross a street, first aid, and more. The only thing left that we have not found out how to keep from killing us is cancer.

Basically we are now living long enough that our chances of having cancer kill us is growing. I recall hearing somewhere that the chances of a male dying from cancer is about 50%. I'm not sure if this was in the USA, world wide, some other nation but that stuck with me.

You are what you eat isn't just a cute little moniker.

With all we know now on what can cause cancer I doubt it's what we eat that causes this.

Re:This is a good thing.

[AcidPenguin9873]

But it takes work.

It takes time. Time is not free. Especially if you're poor and are working a bunch of hours/jobs to pay rent, utilities, afford some sort of food.

Food stamps

[huckamania]

In Belgium they have an egg and milk fund that every family with children gets every month. You can't use it to buy processed foods.

In the United States of America, food stamps (well, credit cards now) can be used to buy processed foods. It's too demeaning to have any proper controls and limit things to rice, flour, sugar, eggs, milk, etc. The big food manufacturers love it, the poor love it and changing it back to the basics (remember government cheese), will be next to impossible to do.

I've noticed that there is a correlation to the people who use food credit cards that they usually have two carts with free food and another with beer and yet more crap that isn't free. Usually they are in front of me in line and yes they are usually fat pushing obese.

I have three kids. I like the way Belgium does it better. The rich have always had a really good deal in the US, because taxes are based on non-investment income (why Warren Buffet still pays a lower percentage in taxes then his secretary). Now the poor also have a good deal. The middle class get jack all in this country. Poor kids get free breakfast and lunch and free after school programs (50$ for my kids). Poor families get free phones, free cable, free housing, free food, etc. But being poor is based on reported income. So there are literally millions in this country who get all the free stuff and can still drive around in a brand new mega truck cause they don't report their income.

More and more are gaming the system and for some getting on the government dole is the new American dream. And in instead of doing anything about this, the government keeps rolling out more and more programs for the fraudsters. I blame the baby boomers and their offspring, of which I am neither.

Re:cultural changes caused it - needs a cultural f

[Anonymous Coward]

The largest cultural shift to happen in your time frame has been two-income households and on top of that most people are working longer hours than ever before.

That means less time to cook nutritious meals, less time to monitor what the kids are doing, and less time for recreation.

This notion of a qualitative shift within a few generations is asinine. There's a reason energy drinks happened within this generation. People are tired and harried.

Re:Not so fast

[serviscope_minor]

I recently read an article that showed the method most western governments use to measure who is over weight is actually not that accurate.

Define: not that accurate.

What you do is take a single variable measurement (height doesn't vary). Not only that but it has to be one that more or less everyone has access to and is pretty much impossible to do wrong (i.e. not waist measurement). That leaves... weight.

So, take weight, height, apply a simpe calculation (or lookup table) and hreshold the result. That's BMI. It's actually pretty good, very good when you look into it deeper. Obviously it's never going to be perfect.

First, the thresholds for obese are set with a high precision and low recall. I.e. if it says you're obese, you very likely are, if it says you're not, then you still might be. People have crunched the numbers and come up with statistics. If it says you're obese, statistically, there's a 5% chance it's wrong.

In fact many professional sports people or gym junkies would be classified as overweight based on the measurement systems used

I looked up a bunch of sports people last time this came up (footballers, tennis players, swimmers, and a few others) and none of them came up as overweight. So, actually plenty of professional athletes come up as normal.

Secondly, it really doesn't matter. If you're a pro athlete, you'll have better tools available to you than BMI. So, fine, don't use it. If you're into serious lifting (and you have to be WAY serious to get an "obese" BMI) then... you have better tools available to you.

For the remaining 95% of the population, BMI is just fine.

It's silly to discount something that's 95% accurate on average and applies least well to the people who have the best ability to use something better.