In 2016, WHO concluded that overweight had tripled since 1975. Worldwide, 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years or over were overweight; of these about 650 million were obese. This is a frightening trend for the world’s adult population, and the situation is even worse for children and adolescents. The percentage of overweight/obese children/adolescents increased from 4% in 1975 to 18% in 2016.
Overall, about 13% of the world’s adult population was obese in 2016. In 2019, an estimated 38.3 million children under the age of 5 years were overweight or obese. Once considered a high income country problem, overweight and obesity are now on the rise in low- to middle-income countries, particularly in urban settings. In Africa, the number of overweight children under 5 has increased by 24% since 2000. Almost half of the children under 5 who were overweight or obese in 2019 lived in Asia. These are all facts from the latest WHO publication on obesity. So obesity is not only a problem in the Western World, like in the USA and the UK, but will become an even bigger problem for the developing countries in the future.
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