About 29 percent of the world’s population, i.e. 2.1 billion people, were either overweight or obese in 2013, says a study released on Thursday.
According to the study, nearly two out of three of the obese live in developing countries. Today, 36.9 percent of the world’s men and 38 percent of women are overweight or obese, the study found.
The study was led by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. It was published on Thursday in the journal the Lancet.
The study showed that the prevalence of obesity and overweight rose by 47.1 percent for children and 27.5 percent for adults between 1980 and 2013.
obese people
In 1980, 857 million people were overweight or obese and this number has rose to a whopping 2.1 billion people.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data that included the heights and weights of people in 183 countries.
The study has found that the increases in overweight and obesity “have been substantial, widespread, and have arisen over a short time.
Talking country wise, Christopher Murray, director of IHME, said that no country reported a significant decrease in obesity over the study period.
“The fact that no country has had a statistically significant reduction in the time period was a surprise,” Murray said.
According to the researchers, more than 50 percent of the world’s 671 million obese people live across ten countries.
These countries (ranking them in order) includes: the U.S., China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
Obesity is the root cause of many lifestyle diseases that are leading to preventable deaths in US. In the past four decades, obesity rates in the US have soared, and kids ages six to 11 have been hit the hardest.
