2024-03-02 06:01:00
The latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), published in the medical journal The Lancet, three days before the world day dedicated to this pathology, are worrying. The obesity rate has quadrupled in thirty years among children and adolescents.
A billion people. One in eight. Obesity has become a real phenomenon that is spreading across the planetshow the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), published Friday by the medical journal The Lancet, three days before the world day dedicated to this pathology.
This threshold had not been anticipated by the WHO before 2030, but the obesity rate has doubled in thirty years. Worse: it has quadrupled among the under-18s.
Boys as children, women as adults
Boys are the most affected among children (59%) and women as adults (54%), notes the WHO, based on more than 3,600 studies covering 197 countries.
And, according to the authors of the study, cited by Le Monde, the evolution of food alone explains part of this acceleration, with a shift “from subsistence and local food to transported commercial goods”, richer in calories, as is processed food which is developing to the detriment of fresh products. Low-income countries are particularly affected by this form of malnutrition.
Food is changing
According to The Lancet, France is making progress in this area, with a 2-point drop in obesity among French women (compared to a 4.6-point drop in Spain) and a stabilization among men.
Diet is changing The proportion of adults suffering from malnutrition or excessive thinness has decreased by more than half over the same period across the world.
So much so that there are now more overweight people than underweight people in most countries. The WHO defines obesity in adults as a body mass index (BMI, i.e. weight divided by height squared) greater than 30 (below 18.5, the person is on the contrary underweight) .
1709366118
#billion #people #affected #explosion #cases #worldwide #obesity #dangerously #gaining #ground
