A third of such people will be living in two regions – MENA and Latin America and the Caribbean, researchers warn.
Nearly 60 percent of all adults and a third of all children in the world will be overweight or obese by 2050 unless governments take action, says a new study.
The research published in the Lancet medical journal on Tuesday used data from 204 countries to paint a grim picture of what it described as one of the great health challenges of the century.
“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” lead author Emmanuela Gakidou, from the United States-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), said in a statement.
The number of overweight or obese people worldwide rose from 929 million in 1990 to 2.6 billion in 2021, the study found.
Without a serious change, the researchers estimate that 3.8 billion adults will be overweight or obese in 15 years – or nearly 60 percent of the global adult population in 2050.
The world’s health systems will come under crippling pressure, the researchers warned, with about a quarter of the world’s obese expected to be aged more than 65 by that time.
They also predicted a 121 percent increase in obesity among children and adolescents around the world.
A third of all obese young people will be living in two regions – the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Latin America and the Caribbean – by 2050, the researchers warned.
But it is not too late to act, said study co-author Jessica Kerr from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia. “Much stronger political commitment is needed to transform diets within sustainable global food systems,” she said.
That commitment was also needed for strategies “that improve people’s nutrition, physical activity and living environments, whether it’s too much processed food or not enough parks, Kerr said.
The study said more than half the world’s overweight or obese adults already live in just eight countries – China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt.
While poor diet and sedentary lifestyles are clearly drivers of the obesity epidemic, “there remains doubt” about the underlying causes for this, said Thorkild Sorensen, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen not involved in the study.
For example, socially deprived groups have a “consistent and unexplained tendency” towards obesity, he said in a linked comment in The Lancet.
A separate study published on Monday, the World Obesity Atlas from the World Obesity Federation, also raised this issue.
“The most affected regions are developing countries,” said Simon Barquera, president of the federation.
The Obesity Atlas suggested that 79 percent of adults and 88 percent of children with obesity and overweight will be living in low- and middle-income countries by 2035, and only 7 percent of all countries have adequate health systems in place to deal with this.
“It’s really one of the main public health challenges around the world,” Barquera added.