Severe obesity continues to increase

More and more people are suffering from severe obesity. In 2022, more than a billion people around the world were obese. Since 1990, the number of people affected has more than doubled among adults and even quadrupled among children and young people. This was shown by a study that was recently published in the journal “The Lancet”. The World Health Organization (WHO) was involved in data collection and analysis in 197 countries.

Obesity, also known as obesity, is a complex chronic disease that can result in other diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. According to the international definition, obesity occurs when the body mass index (BMI) is at least 30. The BMI indicates the ratio of weight (in kg) to height (in m squared).

According to the WHO, severe obesity has now become a global problem that also affects poorer countries. In 2022, around 880 million adults and 160 million children and adolescents worldwide were living with obesity. The highest rates were in island states in the Pacific, where over 60 percent of the population were affected. Germany is in the middle range: In 2022, 19 percent of women (137th place on the country list) and 23 percent of men (80th place) were severely overweight. Among 5- to 19-year-olds, it was 7 percent of girls (119th place) and 10 percent of boys (111th place).

The new study underlines how important it is to counteract obesity from childhood through a healthy diet and physical activity, emphasizes the WHO.

Heike Kreutz, www.bzfe.de