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Research published this week reveals disappointing figures for world health: a comparison of body mass index (BMI) among nearly 20 million adult men and women from 1975 to 2014 shows that obesity has tripled in men and doubled in women. The study was conducted by scientists at the Imperial College London and published in The Lancet. It concluded that there are more adults in the world today who are classified as obese than underweight. The data comes from 186 countries, and found that the number of obese people worldwide had risen from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014.
While it’s widely known that global obesity figures are not far from heartening, especially over the last decade, the gravity of these latest findings may come as a shock. Lead author Professor Majid Ezzat said that the world is experiencing an “epidemic of severe obesity”and that we have reached a crisis point. The research also found that the probability of reaching the World Health Organization’s global obesity target of no rise in obesity above 2010 levels by 2025 is “close to zero.”
Another recent study, this time published in the Journal of Federation of the American Society of Experimental Biology, shows that high exposure to air pollution increases insulin resistance, which is the precursor of diabetes Type 2. In short, exposure to air pollution — something large swaths of the world is dealing with — leads to obesity and makes people prone to hypertension and heart disease.
The message of these studies is simple; air pollution isn’t going away any time soon, and the obesity epidemic is out of control on a global scale. And both issues seem insurmountable. But governments have finally started to push for environmental change, and international non-profits have been working on the obesity issue for some time. Hopefully these efforts will pay off — soon.
