Overweight Equal World’s Underfed
The world’s population is growing--at the waist. For the first time in history, there may be as many people overweight, 1.1 billion, as there are underfed, researchers report.
Just because people are gaining weight does not mean the world is better fed or healthier than it was two decades ago when millions more were starving, the environmental research group Worldwatch Institute said in a report released today. In fact, the report says being obese or underweight often results from the same problem: malnutrition.
In some countries there is a growing so-called weight gap. Well-off minorities in India, China, Brazil and some other developing nations are growing fat as the poor go hungry.
The United States and other wealthier countries have the opposite problem: The richer and better-educated tend to eat right, while the poor often balloon from a diet of cheap and fatty fast foods.
“Often, nations simply have traded hunger for obesity, and diseases of poverty for diseases of excess,” said Worldwatch researcher Brian Halwell, who wrote the report with fellow researcher Gary Gardner.
In the United States, 55% of the population is overweight, with 1 in 4 adults considered obese, according to the most recent surveys cited in the report.
Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany also have overweight majorities, U.N. studies show.
In comparison, 56% of Bangladesh’s population is underweight. The figure is 53% for India.
Despite overall progress in feeding the world that has led to sharp reductions of underweight children in Asia and Latin America since 1980, the number of underfed children continues to grow in the poorest countries, in sub-Saharan Africa.
Both the overweight and the underweight live in worlds of sickness, disability, shortened life expectancy and lower productivity levels, Halwell said.
“This is not based on some fashion magazine’s notion of proper weight or the standard set by the latest sitcom star,” but on a widely accepted international standard, Halwell said in an interview.
The conclusions are based on the “body mass index,” or BMI, with 19 to 25 considered normal. A person’s BMI is weight in pounds, divided by the square of height in inches, then multiplied by 703.
While countries, including the U.S., do not generally include height and weight questions in census questionnaires, medical clinics, doctors and hospitals in most countries collect and report the data.
Halwell and Gardner use World Health Organization, United Nations and individual government figures to calculate that a global weigh-in would find 1.1 billion men, women and children underweight, down slightly from the 1980s, and about the same number overweight--a considerable increase.
