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Food and Health Fact #206: The Silent Pandemic
Matthew Rees
March 04, 2024
But there’s an even deadlier pandemic spreading throughout the United States and the rest world: obesity. It’s taking the lives of an estimated five million people annually and its incidence is rising. “Dietary risk” is already the world’s second-leading cause of death among women (after high blood pressure), and third among men (after high blood pressure and tobacco use), according to the Global Burden of Disease study published in 2020.
This gloomy outlook grows out of last week’s release of a new report by The Lancet, which is focused on global obesity trends from 1990-2022 (and pegged to today being World Obesity Day). A few sobering data points:
Globally, the women’s obesity rate has more than doubled since 1990 (from 8.8 percent to 18.5 percent). Among men, it has nearly tripled (from 4.8 percent to 14 percent).
Since 1990, the global obesity rate among children and adolescents (5 to 19 years of age) has quadrupled, reaching about 8 percent.
Since 1990, the adult obesity rate among women has increased in 94 percent of countries. Among men, obesity has risen in all but one country.
In 49 countries, the obesity rate among adult women has increased more than 20 percentage points since 1990. There were 24 such countries for men.
In India, the world’s most populated country, nearly 10 percent of adult women are now obese, up from 1.2 per cent in 1990. The corresponding figures for adult men in India are 5.4 percent and 0.5 per cent.
The countries with the largest absolute numbers of adults with obesity are the United States, China, and India.
Yet obesity is given short shrift, if not ignored, by leading policymakers, researchers, and multilateral organizations throughout the world. It’s a striking contrast to the Covid pandemic, which prompted a shutdown of everyday life to try to get it under control.
Why the silence? There’s the influence of food and beverage companies on public policy, there’s “boiled frog” theory that the world has slowly resigned itself to diet-induced deaths (though the underlying theory about frogs is hokum), and there’s the fact that even leading experts don’t know precisely what to do. But no, flooding the world with Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs is not a long-term solution.
The fundamental issue is how to get people to consume more healthy products and fewer unhealthy products. There are lessons to learned from the campaign to curtail tobacco use – the U.S. smoking rate has declined nearly 75 percent since 1965.
But progress will only come with a multi-pronged campaign, drawing on doctors who are better educated about the intersection of food and health, food companies selling healthier products, and even consumer researchers who can shape consumer preferences. Given what’s at stake, that progress can’t happen soon enough.
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