May 31, 2014: Researchers found more than 2 billion people worldwide are now overweight or obese. The highest rates were in the Middle East and North Africa, where nearly 60 percent of men and 65 percent of women are too large and heavy.
The U.S. has about 13 percent of the world’s ’ fat’ population, a greater percentage than any other country. China and India combined have about 15 percent. Almost a third of the world is now fat, and no country has been able to curb obesity rates in the last three decades, according to the latest global analysis.
“It’s pretty grim,” said Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study. He and colleagues reviewed more than 1,700 studies covering 188 countries from 1980 to 2013. “When we realized that not a single country has had a significant decline in obesity, that tells you how hard a challenge this is.”
Murray said a strong link was clear between income and obesity; as people get richer, their waistlines also tend to start bulging. He said scientists have noticed accompanying spikes in diabetes and rates of cancers linked to weight. The new report was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published online May 29 in the journal Lancet .
Last week, the World Health Organization established a high-level commission tasked with ending childhood obesity. “Our children are getting fatter,” Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general, said bluntly during a speech at the agency’s annual meeting in Geneva.
“Parts of the world are quite literally eating themselves to death.” “Modernization has not been good for health,” said Syed Shah, an obesity expert at United Arab Emirates University, who found obesity rates have jumped five times in the last 20 years even in a handful of remote Himalayan villages in Pakistan. It is indeed time that people everywhere stop and make a definite road plan to combat this scourge which will lead to very grave consequences.
A reasearch team also concludes : Sleeping with too much light in the room increases the risk of obesity in women. Greater exposure to light at night raised both Body Mass Index (BMI) and waist size in more than 113,000 women taking part in the British study, scientists found.
The Breakthrough Generations Study followed the women for 40 years in an attempt to identify root causes of breast cancer. Obesity is a known risk factor for the disease, it is reported. Professor Anthony Swerdlow, from The Institute of Cancer Research in London, said that metabolism is affected by cyclical rhythms within the body that relate to sleeping, waking and light exposure.