The future is going to be really fat: By 2025, one fifth of all humans estimated to be obese

Saturday, April 23, 2016 by: Julie Wilson staff writer
Tags: global obesity, processed foods, diabetes

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(NaturalNews) It's no secret that the American diet is one of the unhealthiest diets on the planet; loaded with trans fat, refined sugars and an abundance of red meat, it's no wonder that people are getting fatter. Obviously, an unhealthy diet leads to an unhealthy lifestyle, a problem that more and more Americans have to deal with.

In less than a decade, more than 20 percent of women and 18 percent of men are expected to be labeled obese, according to a new study published in the UK medical journal The Lancet. Researchers looked at trends in adult body-mass index in 200 countries between 1975 and 2014, analyzing population-based studies measuring height and weight in individuals 18 and older.

Information was pulled from data sources containing more than 19 million participants. What they found is that, in four decades, global obesity has more than tripled among men and doubled among women.

Combating obesity looks grim

Scientists say that if the fat trends continue, "the probability of meeting the global obesity target is virtually zero." Instead, "if these trends continue, by 2025, global obesity prevalence will reach 18% in men and surpass 21% in women; severe obesity will surpass 6% in men and 9% in women."

Being overweight is largely detrimental to maintaining good health, as it increases the risk for cardiovascular and kidney diseases, diabetes, some cancers and musculoskeletal disorders.

"The world has transitioned from an era when underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight," the researchers wrote in their report.

Based on the study results, it is now more likely that a country has more obese people than it does underweight individuals. In 136 countries, more men were obese than they were underweight. And in 165 countries, more women were obese than were underweight.

Another shocking statistic that emerged from the research is that, worldwide, obesity has increased from 2.6 percent in 1975 to just under 9 percent in 2014.

English-speaking nations are the fattest

The countries with the most fat people include Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the U.S.; which account for more than 25 percent of the world's fattest people. The second fattest region was the Middle East and North Africa, home to 26 million or 14 percent of the world's severely obese people, reports CNN Health.

Several Caribbean countries also high have rates of obesity, ranging from 40 to 50 percent of the population.

The study also looked at individuals who are underweight. Less than 1 percent of men living in Burundi, Africa, and Timor-Leste, a sovereign state in Southeast Asia, were not obese. Less than 5 percent of women living in Timor-Leste, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos and Bangladesh were not obese.

In 1975, China ranked 60th and 41st for severely obese men and women; however, fast forward to 2014 and the nation now comes in second for both.

But the U.S. ranks number one in terms of obesity. More than one in four obese men and one in five obese women live in America, the study found.

"This study provides the longest and most complete picture of trends in adult BMI, including, for the first time, in underweight and severe and morbid obesity, which are of enormous clinical and public health interest," the researchers wrote.

Sources:

CNN.com

TheLancet.com

Science.NaturalNews.com