20160401 - world obesitas

Obesity and overweight

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Key facts

• Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980.
• In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.
• 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2014, and 13% were obese.
• Most of the world's population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
• 42 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2013.
• Obesity is preventable.

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What are overweight and obesity?

Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health.
Body mass index (BMI) is a simple index of weight-for-height that is commonly used to classify overweight and obesity in adults. It is defined as a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of his height in meters (kg/m²).
The WHO definition is:

• a BMI greater than or equal to 25 is overweight
• a BMI greater than or equal to 30 is obesity.

BMI provides the most useful population-level measure of overweight and obesity as it is the same for both sexes and for all ages of adults. However, it should be considered a rough guide because it may not correspond to the same degree of fatness in different individuals.

Facts about overweight and obesity

Some recent WHO global estimates follow.

• In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.
• Overall, about 13% of the world’s adult population (11% of men and 15% of women) were obese in 2014.
• In 2014, 39% of adults aged 18 years and over (38% of men and 40% of women) were overweight.
• The worldwide prevalence of obesity more than doubled between 1980 and 2014.

In 2013, 42 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese. Once considered a high-income country problem, overweight and obesity are now on the rise in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban settings. In developing countries with emerging economies (classified by the World Bank as lower- and middle-income countries) the rate of increase of childhood overweight and obesity has been more than 30% higher than that of developed countries.
Overweight and obesity are linked to more deaths worldwide than underweight. Most of the world's population live in countries where overweight and obesity kill more people than underweight (this includes all high-income and most middle-income countries).


 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/
 http://www.lovelljohns.com/blog/index.php/2012/07/06/world-obesity-map/obesity-world-map-global-2/