New Delhi, March 4
A most comprehensive global analysis to date, including India, has estimated that overweight and obesity rates in adults (aged 25 or older) and children and adolescents (aged 5-24 years) more than doubled over the past three decades (1990-2021), affecting 2.11 billion adults and 493 million young people worldwide in 2021, according to a study published in The Lancet.
Weight gain varies widely across the globe with more than half of the world’s adults with overweight or obesity in 2021 living in just eight countries — China (402 million), India (180 million), the US (172 million), Brazil (88 million), Russia (71 million), Mexico (58 million), Indonesia (52 million), and Egypt (41 million).
Without urgent policy reform and action, around 60 per cent of adults (3.8 billion) and a third (31 per cent) of all children and adolescents (746 million) are forecast to be living with either overweight or obesity by 2050, according to the major analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study BMI Collaborators, published in The Lancet.
By 2050, one in three young people with obesity (130 million) are forecast to be living in just two regions — north Africa and the Middle East and Latin America and the Caribbean — with deleterious health, economic, and societal consequences, the study warned.
Additionally, nearly a quarter of the world’s adult population with obesity in 2050 are predicted to be aged 65 or older, intensifying the strain on already overburdened health-care systems and wreaking havoc on health services in low-resource countries.