Advertisement
A surprising new study has found that for the very first time ever, there are currently more overweight people in the world than underweight.
The study, featured in The Lancet, predicts that 18% of men and 21% of women will be obese by 2025, if these trends continue.
Believe it or not, over the last 40 years, global obesity has doubled among women and tripled among men, according to the study’s researchers.
To begin the study, the researchers took a look at global, regional, and national body mass index patterns among adults from 1975 to 2014.
Shockingly enough, the research team found that there were about 641 million obese people in 2014, compared to 105 million in 1975.
Not only have obesity rates skyrocketed in the last few decades, but the number of underweight individuals have actually plummeted all over the world, expect in regions like East Africa and South Asia.
“Over the past 40 years, we have changed from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” study author Majid Ezzati, from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, said in a statement.
Based on these new findings, 1 in 5 adults will be considered overweight in the next nine years.
“Present interventions and policies have not been able to stop the rise in BMI in most countries,” the study authors concluded. “To avoid an epidemic of severe obesity, the next step must be to implement these policies, and to systematically assess their effect.”
