Obesity Rates Are Rising Around The World

Obesity is proving to be a global tsunami of a health problem, and from the looks of things there’s no stopping it.

Via the New York Times

Obesity rates worldwide have doubled in the last three decades, even as blood pressure and cholesterol levels have dropped, according to three new studies being published Friday in The Lancet, a British medical journal. Researchers said they were concerned about how much worse the o1besity problem could get.

And perhaps to no one’s surprise, America is leading the way:

People in the Pacific Islands, like American Samoa, are the heaviest, one of the studies found. In developed countries, Americans are the fattest and Japanese are the slimmest.

In the original paper, the researchers express a more dour attitude towards the situation than the New York Times:

The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures for the US population in 2010 released in July are alarming: 12 states have obesity rates higher than 30% and no state had a rate lower than 20%. Since these figures rely on self-reported height and weight, they are likely to be underestimated.

Most of the items discussed in the paper are probably not all that new to anyone who follows the situation. By now we all kind of know that the world is getting fatter, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to stop it. The way we eat is shaped by a lot of environmental factors that no one body can control, and thus far our instinctive preferences towards certain dietary habits seem to be immutable.

The other papers discussed in the Lancet are here, here, and here.