More People on Earth Now Obese Than Underweight for the First Time in History

According to a new study by the Lancet, obese people now outnumber the underweight population for perhaps the first time in global history. Majid Ezzati, an environmental health researcher at Imperial College London who led the study, found that over the 40-year-span, the proportion of obese men worldwide more than tripled, to roughly 11 percent, and the proportion of obese woman more than doubled, to about 15 percent. Researchers estimate 18 percent of men and 21 percent of women worldwide will be obese by 2025.  It’s interesting to note that more than 25 percent of the world’s severely obese men and almost 20 percent of the world’s severely obese women are American. The impact of the obesity epidemic on developing nations is even more troubling. “In America, you can ameliorate your diet or blood sugar, or take cholesterol medicine, but in these developing countries, once things get bad, the mortality rates can’t be checked,” said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist at the Harvard School of Public Health. (statnews.com)