The share of obese French people has continued to increase in recent years, with a particularly marked increase among the youngest adults, according to Inserm researchers conducting a benchmark study on the subject revealed last week. Obesity knows “an increase which is strong in the youngest age groups“, summarized Annick Fontbonne, epidemiologist, during a press conference.
The researcher detailed this study she conducted on the proportion of obese or overweight adults in France in 2020. According to her, nearly half of French people (47%) weigh too much compared to medical recommendations. An alarming statistic especially as “post-Covid figures are not taken into account in this study“, worries Thierry Bège, visceral surgeon at the Center specializing in obesity at the North Hospital. More generally, Inserm data reveal that a sixth of French people (17%) are obese, that is that is to say at a level of weight considered unhealthy as opposed to simply being overweight.However, if the latter has tended to stabilize or even decrease for a decade, obesity continues to affect more and more French people.
These results were already generally known, because they had been made public last year by the league once morest Obesity, an association which relaunched this study following a period of inactivity. But they are now the subject of a publication in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, and in the meantime, the researchers were able to refine their conclusions. They have thus noticed that the rise in obesity particularly affects 18-24 year olds. The latter are, in absolute terms, the least affected age group with a tenth (9.2%) obese, but this share has quadrupled over the past twenty years.
Find our entire file today in La Provence, Marseille edition, as well as online with testimonials and an immersion in the North hospital: “Discrimination, insults: zoom on traumatic grossophobia”