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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.
I'm old enough (58) to have seen some cultural shifts which seem related to this. I don't think it is anything so simple that you can blame it all on a few things, but it seems to me that these cannot possibly be helping:
** When I was a school child, there were no video games or internet. When you wanted to play, you got some friends together and had a pickup game of baseball or you rode your bikes around town or did some other outdoor activity. We were physically active on a daily basis, while now the normal entertainment is to sit still and play games. There's nothing wrong with games, but every hour spent doing that is one hour not spent running around outside burning calories.
** Sugar based sodas were consumed in moderation, or often, not at all. There were no "64 Oz Big Gulps", and no one ever drank sodas in my school. Your choices were milk or water. Parents rarely let children consume sodas.
** There was less acceptance of overweight people, more social shaming. I won't say that was a good thing - shaming people can cause long term emotional harm and hurts in other ways. But one byproduct of this is that no one wanted to be "that fat kid". (My school had just one fat kid, where now childhood obesity is systemic, and I see 3rd graders who look... morbidly obese).
Now I'm nearing 60 and still normal weight. I have an easier time going up multiple flights of steps than, I would estimate, around 2/3 of the people who are in their 20's, because I'm carrying 50, 100, sometimes even 200 pounds less than they are at the same height.
I think the solution needs a cultural shift back towards valuing healthy eating and exercise. There are no shortcuts. The culture has to value this, or it won't happen.
It takes time. Time is not free.
While I absolutely agree with you that finding the time when working multiple jobs is hard for poor people, the effort and skills are another major barrier.
If you have a $10-20 crockpot and a refrigerator (or better, a freezer), you can easily make meals by dumping a few ingredients together with 15 minutes prep on the weekend or day off. 4-8 hours later you come back, and you have meals for the week. It's no harder to microwave or reheat on the stovetop than a frozen processed meal or canned dinner, but often a lot cheaper. Instead of taking 5 minutes extra to drive to the fast food place, take 5 minutes to cut up some fruit or veggies or prep a quick sidedish to eat with your bulk meals you prepped in advance.
It takes a bit of work and planning, as well as a little knowledge about how to make a regimen like this work... But it doesn't have to take more than a few minutes per day and can save significant money. (A $20 family dinner from a fast food joint looks good until you realize you could often feed your family all their meals for half that with some planning.)
I visit the USA several times a year. I come from a place where obesity is much less common, and much less extreme. These are my observations of the USA. I don't want this to sound like I'm hating on Americans, because some of you are super nice. This is just what I've seen.
The obesity axis runs diagonally, northwest to south east. People in Seattle are not much bigger then people around here. People in Mobile were appallingly huge. My theory is this correlates with biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.
It also correlates with escalators. In Seattle most people were walking up the escalators, In Mobile nobody walked up escalators.
A much bigger percentage of black people are overweight compared to white people. (Is this poverty related?).
You all drink way too much coke cola. I met people who drank 2 or three cans of soda per day at work and then drank it with every lunch and dinner.
Food servings in some restaurants are stupid big. Plates of spaghetti that two of us couldn't finish. 24 ounce prime rib. (really)
Most appalling thing I saw was whole families of fat people which is super rare here. Like mom and dad both 250 lbs plus and then 2 or 3 huge fat kids. Around here if your ten year old was 150 lbs the child welfare people would be all over you.