[Prevalence of obesity in women 20 years or older, 2013]
Since one of the consequences of childhood adversity can be obesity, it's interesting to read this report about how obesity is increasing world-wide.
We tend to think of obesity as a rich-country problem, but for several years now evidence has been building that the public-health hazard is assailing low- and middle-income countries as well, even as these same countries struggle with high rates of malnutrition. In perhaps the most comprehensive snapshot yet of this phenomenon, a study published in The Lancet on Thursday found that one-third of the world's population is now overweight or obese, and 62 percent of these individuals live in developing countries.
The graph below shows how the prevalence of overweight and obese men and women has risen between 1980 and 2013 in the developing and developed world, and as a whole. The research team—led by the Washington-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—defined "overweight" adults as those with a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 30, and "obese" adults as those with a BMI of 30 or more.
These across-the-board increases translate into the global overweight and obese population ballooning from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013. Men tend to have higher obesity rates in developed countries, and women tend to have higher rates in developing countries.
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