You’re probably thinking, “Wait, didn’t obese people outnumbering underweight folks happen a long time ago? Didn’t this happen back when McDonald’s introduced the supersize? Didn’t this happen when a small tub of popcorn at your local movie theatre could feed a family of 5 for a week?”
This is exactly what most will think , but the obesity epidemic isn’t just a problem in the good old US of A; the land of the free and the home of the Whopper. According to a recent study published by the Lancet Medical Journal, for the first time in history, or rather since people started to keep scientific burn books about who’s a fatty and who’s skinny, there are currently more obese people than underweight people in the entire world. Yes, the world comes together every 4 years for the Olympics, but now we can come together as a global society when it comes to our eating habits and poor diets:
This was no easy task. Research was done from 1975 to 2014 with over 19.2 million people from 186 different countries. The study concluded that 10.8 percent of men are considered obese whereas 14.9 percent of women are. The term obese is used for people with a body mass index of 30 or higher. On the flip side, only 8.8 percent of men and 9.7 percent of women are underweight having a BMI of under 18.5.
Even though the obesity epidemic is a problem stateside, we are not the fattest country in the world according to this study. Who’s packing on the most pounds? ABC notes that Polynesia and Micronesia have the highest BMI averages, and in the American Samoa the average BMI for men is 32.2 and a staggering 34.8 for women. These places are tiny islands in the Pacific. The lowest averages were found in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
(Via ABC News)
