Half a billion adults are obese worldwide.
More than half a billion adults are clinically obese in a near-doubling of the numbers of dangerously overweight adults since 1980s , doctors warned on Friday . Nearly one in nine of all adults — are clinically obese, according to research by a team from Imperial College London , Harvard and the World Health Organisation (WHO ).
In 2008 , the latest year for which statistics were available , nearly one woman in seven and one man in 10 were obese, it found . Being too fat causes three million premature deaths each year from heart disease , diabetes , cancers and other disorders , according to the WHO . The researchers described the tableau as “a population emergency.” “( It) will cost tens of millions of preventable deaths unless rapid and widespread actions are taken by governments and health-care systems worldwide ,” said the report , published by The Lancet .
The problem has been most prevalent in rich nations, rising most in the United States , followed by New Zealand and Australia for women , and Britain and Australia for men . But many developing countries, especially in the Middle East and in rapidly urbanising areas, are catching up. “These results suggest that overweight affects one-in-three adults and obesity affects one-in-nine adults — a tsunami of obesity that will eventually affect all regions of the world ,” Sonia Anand and Salim Yusuf of Canada’s McMaster University wrote in the study .
Children of working moms gain weight
The more mothers work during their children’s lifetimes, the more likely their kids are to be overweight or obese, according to a US study published on Friday. Researchers from American University in Washington, Cornell University in New York state and the University of Chicago studied data on more than 900 elementary- and middle-school-aged children in 10 US cities. They found that the total number of years the children’s mothers worked had a cumulative influence on their children’s body mass index (BMI) — the weight to height ratio used to measure if a person is overweight or obese.
Via Times of India
