More than one billion people in the world now live with obesity, analysis finds – CTV
March 1, 2024
More than one billion children, adolescents and adults live with obesity around the world, making it the most common form of malnutrition in many countries, according to an analysis published Thursday in the journal The Lancet.
This staggering statistic was reached earlier than anticipated, driven in large part by the rapid transition of malnutrition in the form of underweight to obesity in low-income and middle-income countries, Dr. Majid Ezzati, senior author of the analysis and professor at Imperial College London, said in a news conference Thursday.
Previous estimates by the World Obesity Federation suggested that there would be one billion people living with obesity by 2030, but that number was already surpassed in 2022, Ezzati said.
“We’ve really been taken aback by how fast things have happened,” he said.
