Almost 60% of all adults and a third of all children in the world will be overweight or obese by 2050, unless governments take action, a major study said on Tuesday.
The research published in the Lancet Medical Journal used data from 204 countries to paint a dark picture of what he described as one of the great challenges of health of the century.
“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a deep tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” said the main author Emmanuela Gakidou, of the American Institute for Metrics and the Evaluation of Health (IHME).
The number of overweight or obese people worldwide increased from 929 million in 1990 to 2.6 billion in 2021, revealed that the study.
Without a serious change, researchers estimate that 3.8 billion adults will be overweight or obese in 15 years – about 60% of the world’s adult population in 2050.
The world’s health systems will undergo paralyzing pressure, the researchers warned, with approximately a quarter of the world’s obese people who should be over 65 at that time.
They also predicted a 121% increase in obesity in children and adolescents around the world.
A third of all young obese people will live in two regions – North Africa and the Middle East and Latin America and the Caribbean – by 2050, have warned the researchers.
But it is not too late to act, said the co-author of the study Jessica Kerr of Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia.
“A much stronger political commitment is necessary to transform food regimes into sustainable global food systems,” she said.
This commitment was also necessary for strategies “which improve people’s nutrition, physical activity and life environments, whether it is too much food transformed or not enough parks,” said Kerr.
More than half of overweight or obese adults in the world already live in only eight countries – China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt, the study said.
Although poor food and sedentary lifestyles are clearly engines of the obesity epidemic, “there is a doubt” about the underlying causes of this, said Thorkild Sorensen, researcher at the University of Copenhagen who is not involved in the study.
For example, socially private groups have a “coherent and unexplained tendency” towards obesity, he said in a comment linked in the Lancet.
Research is based on the figures of the global study of the burden of IHME diseases, which brings together thousands of researchers around the world and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
