An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than half of the world’s population will be overweight or obese by 2035 unless governments take decisive action to curb the growing epidemic of excess weight, a report has warned. About 2.6 billion people globally — 38% of the world population — are already overweight or obese. But on current trends that is expected to rise to more than 4 billion people (51%) in 12 years’ time, according to research by the World Obesity Federation.
Without widespread use of tactics such as taxes and limits on the promotion of unhealthy food, the number of people who are clinically obese will increase from one in seven today to one in four by 2035. If that happens, almost 2 billion people worldwide would be living with obesity. Those with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 are judged to be overweight, while people whose BMI is at least 30 are deemed to be obese. Evidence shows that obesity increases someone’s risk of cancer, heart disease and other diseases.
Obesity among children and young people is on course to increase faster than among adults. By 2035 it is expected to be at least double the rate seen in 2020, according to the federation’s latest annual World Obesity Atlas report. It is expected to rise by 100% among boys under 18, leaving 208 million affected, but go up even more sharply — by 125% — among girls the same age, which would see 175 million of them affected. […] The federation’s report also highlights that many of the world’s poorest countries are facing the sharpest increases in obesity yet are the least well prepared to confront the disease. Nine of the 10 countries set to experience the biggest rises in coming years are low- or middle-income nations in Africa and Asia. “The global cost of obesity is also due to rocket, from $1.96 trillion in 2019 to $4.32 trillion by 2035, which would be the equivalent of 3% of global GDP — a sum comparable to the economic damage wrought by Covid-19 — the federation estimates,” adds the report.
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