• Home
  • Politics
  • Health
  • World
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
What's Hot

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
Friday, May 9
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
  • Home
  • Politics

    Security video shows brazen sexual assault of California woman by homeless man

    October 24, 2023

    Woman makes disturbing discovery after her boyfriend chases away home intruder who stabbed him

    October 24, 2023

    Poll finds Americans overwhelmingly support Israel’s war on Hamas, but younger Americans defend Hamas

    October 24, 2023

    Off-duty pilot charged with 83 counts of attempted murder after allegedly trying to shut off engines midflight on Alaska Airlines

    October 23, 2023

    Leaked audio of Shelia Jackson Lee abusively cursing staffer

    October 22, 2023
  • Health

    Disparities In Cataract Care Are A Sorry Sight

    October 16, 2023

    Vaccine Stocks—Including Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech And Novavax—Slide Amid Plummeting Demand

    October 16, 2023

    Long-term steroid use should be a last resort

    October 16, 2023

    Rite Aid Files For Bankruptcy With More ‘Underperforming Stores’ To Close

    October 16, 2023

    Who’s Still Dying From Complications Related To Covid-19?

    October 16, 2023
  • World

    New York Democrat Dan Goldman Accuses ‘Conservatives in the South’ of Holding Rallies with ‘Swastikas’

    October 13, 2023

    IDF Ret. Major General Describes Rushing to Save Son, Granddaughter During Hamas Invasion

    October 13, 2023

    Black Lives Matter Group Deletes Tweet Showing Support for Hamas 

    October 13, 2023

    AOC Denounces NYC Rally Cheering Hamas Terrorism: ‘Unacceptable’

    October 13, 2023

    L.A. Prosecutors Call Out Soros-Backed Gascón for Silence on Israel

    October 13, 2023
  • Business

    Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

    May 8, 2025

    Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

    May 7, 2025

    Tyson Foods Announces It Will Bend The Knee To Trump Admin’s New Rules

    May 7, 2025

    Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady Despite Pressure From Trump

    May 7, 2025

    ‘Wait Them Out’: John Kennedy Tells Larry Kudlow One Lie He Suspects China’s Telling US

    May 7, 2025
  • Finance

    Ending China’s De Minimis Exception Brings 3 Benefits for Americans

    April 17, 2025

    The Trump Tariff Shock Should Push Indonesia to Reform Its Economy

    April 17, 2025

    Tariff Talks an Opportunity to Reinvigorate the Japan-US Alliance

    April 17, 2025

    How China’s Companies Are Responding to the US Trade War

    April 16, 2025

    The US Flip-flop Over H20 Chip Restrictions 

    April 16, 2025
  • Tech

    Cruz Confronts Zuckerberg on Pointless Warning for Child Porn Searches

    February 2, 2024

    FTX Abandons Plans to Relaunch Crypto Exchange, Commits to Full Repayment of Customers and Creditors

    February 2, 2024

    Elon Musk Proposes Tesla Reincorporates in Texas After Delaware Judge Voids Pay Package

    February 2, 2024

    Tesla’s Elon Musk Tops Disney’s Bob Iger as Most Overrated Chief Executive

    February 2, 2024

    Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth Grew $84 Billion in 2023 as Pedophiles Target Children on Facebook, Instagram

    February 2, 2024
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
Home»Health»BMI is starting to plateau in rich countries. But obesity still isn’t solved
Health

BMI is starting to plateau in rich countries. But obesity still isn’t solved

June 8, 2023No Comments11 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
BMI is starting to plateau in rich countries. But obesity still isn't solved
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

This is part of a series about new obesity drugs that are transforming patients’ lives, dividing medical experts, and spurring one of the biggest business battles in years. Read more about The Obesity Revolution.

“Soaring obesity rates.” “An alarming surge in BMI.”

We’ve grown accustomed to the obesity trend stories over the last few decades, since prevalence rates started to rise. And rise they did: From 1976 to 1980, some 15% of U.S. adults qualified as having obesity while less than 5% of people in most of the world’s high-density regions were considered as such. Today, the U.S. number is 42% — a near tripling. And if global trends continue, a recent report from the World Obesity Federation suggested, over half the world’s population will either have overweight or obesity by 2035.

A closer look at the latest global obesity data tells a more nuanced story than monolithic surging. It’s true that, worldwide, obesity continues to rise. But in high-income countries, such as the U.S., the rate of increase in body mass index, or BMI, has actually been slowing, even beginning to level off. In these places, “the real takeoff was in the ’80s, ’90s, early 2000s,” said Boyd Swinburn, a University of Auckland professor who has been tracking global obesity trends, “and then it started to plateau.” Nowadays, most of the global growth is being driven by the sharp increases in low- and middle-income countries.

The idea that growth in average BMI has been slowing down in the U.S. may seem surprising given headlines about the obesity crisis or the inescapable advertisements for new weight-loss-inducing medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. But the trend doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. More Americans than ever are reaching the territory of severe obesity. It also doesn’t mean countries that saw their obesity rates increase first are going to plateau at the same levels. Swinburn and other researchers find that different countries follow different obesity trajectories based on unique sets of social, policy, economic, and cultural factors. In American Samoa, roughly 60% of adults now have obesity — while many countries see their growth stagnating before reaching such heights. In France, for example, the obesity rate has long hovered around 20%. The U.S., in the none-too-healthy middle, remains one of the countries with the highest obesity prevalence in the world.

Dissecting the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, and the World Obesity Federation, some exclusively shared with STAT, takes us a long way to understanding what’s going on with obesity in the U.S. and worldwide — and how we got here.

As countries gain wealth, obesity rates rise

For a while, humanity’s increasing body size was a good news story. Over a century ago, malnutrition and deficiency diseases such as goiter, rickets, and pellagra were common, stunting human growth — both height and body weight — as a result. As countries gained wealth, and more and more people got access to a diversity of nutrient-rich food, humans began to realize their potential in terms of body size, explained Stephen O’Rahilly, director of the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit at the University of Cambridge.

As a species, we’re much taller today compared to a century ago. Body weight also increased, while the proportion of people who classify as underweight shrunk.

See also  Income rank linked to experience of physical pain, irrespective of whether in a rich or poor country, study suggests

In the case of both height and weight, O’Rahilly summed up, “Genetics determine where you are on [the normal] distribution. And then the environment shifts the whole distribution.” You can see the shift in the U.S. here — more and more people were classified as having obesity after 1980. But unlike height, body weight followed a different trajectory. Not only were people gradually getting bigger, the normal distribution skewed: the tail on the right-hand side of the BMI distribution grew long. (BMI, while a flawed tool for assessing an individual’s body fat, is widely used to study population trends.)

Severe obesity is rising

This means more people have been living with more severe forms of obesity — a problem that’s set to increase dramatically in some countries, including places where the overall growth in BMI is slowing down.

Take the U.S. According to data from the World Obesity Federation, exclusively shared with STAT, severe obesity — classified in this case as a BMI 35 or greater — is currently projected at 20% of the population, and expected to rise to 36% by 2035, if current trends continue. Overall, the prevalence rate of severe obesity will double in high-income countries in the same period, from roughly 10% to 20%, overtaking the growth rate of obesity (BMI ≥30). According to the federation, low- and middle-income countries will also see this doubling in severe obesity.

This gets at the idea that “obesity begets obesity,” Swinburn said. “People end up caught in cycles,” and the result is “a shift of the whole curve distribution to the right, but it’s also skewed.” He called this “an underappreciated issue with big consequences” since the relative risks of many diseases, especially diabetes, increase exponentially when BMI is beyond 30.

The shift to ‘obesogenic’ food environments drove obesity

How did we get here? This is a matter of some debate among obesity researchers. One obvious culprit is that we’re more sedentary, and therefore burning fewer calories, especially on the job — though recreational physical activity may have increased over time. Another explanation researchers are actively probing is that thousands of chemicals — including fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, and additives — have entered our food supply, and may be interfering with human metabolism. The food supply changed another way: Calories are now plentiful. And there’s pretty strong consensus that increases in calorie intake can account for the increases in body mass — more so than any decrease in physical activity.

In particular, the rise of ultra-processed foods — that is relatively cheap, easy to consume, calorie-dense, and often shelf-stable goods — tracks neatly with growth in obesity levels.

Some of the world’s longest-term data on food consumption patterns, processed and otherwise, comes from Canada. Focused on calories available in the household and the share of the budget spent on different alimentary categories, a team of researchers at Université de Montréal and the University of São Paulo found that around the late 1940s, a quarter of calories available at home came from ultra-processed foods. Back then, the category featured mainly breads, spreads, and sauces, and spending on these goods accounted for less than a third of the family food budget. By the early 1980s, the calories available jumped to 47% — and obesity rates were rising in suit. Sugar- and fat-laden snacks and sweetened products, rather than foods like breads or sauces, were the major sources of ultra-processed calories.

See also  'It's A B***h, But You Gotta Do It. Find A Way To Get Your Hands On $100,000' – Why Earning Your First $100,000 Is Key If You Want To Be Rich

Today, it’s not just that half of the available household calories are ultra-processed; roughly half of all the calories Americans consume are. The category is still rising globally, fastest in low- and middle-income countries. As Phil Baker, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia, said, you can now find cans of Spam in the remotest corners of the Pacific Islands, where obesity is an urgent problem. All the while, spending and consumption of unprocessed or minimally processed foods has plummeted. So has time spent cooking at home.

A recent preprint from a National Institutes of Health researcher describes how ultra-processed foods proliferated, along with obesity — another good news story turned bad for health. In the quest to feed humanity, and prevent the deficiency diseases that used to curb growth and development, humans revolutionized agricultural practices, boosted public investments in infrastructure, and improved manufacturing methods, processing to “‘add value’ to their products” and sell more. Meanwhile, government subsidies supported commodity crop production — foods like soy and corn that were used to feed animals and had to be heavily processed to feed humans.

“In other words, society has incentivized surplus agricultural production (relying on cheap fossil fuels) to provide low-cost inputs to food and beverage industries that produce heavily marketed, convenient, rewarding, timesaving, and relatively inexpensive ultra-processed foods in great excess of consumption needs of the population, albeit with large inequities in food distribution and nutrition security,” the paper reads.

Global food manufacturers also refined their techniques for successfully marketing their processed products. “They really focus from birth onward,” said Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina, pushing formulas to replace mother’s milk, and cartoon-filled advertising for foods targeting children.

It’s no wonder childhood obesity rates are also rising globally, and no country has turned the trend around:

This is all part of the ‘obesity transition’

Building on the work of Popkin, who described the “nutrition transition” — how diets, physical activity patterns, and causes of disease shift as countries move out of poverty — Swinburn and colleagues came up with the idea of the “obesity transition,” or four stages countries move through as obesity prevalence rises.

At stage one, when obesity rates are still low, populations are too poor, maybe even too war-torn, to get enough food — but obesity prevalence starts increasing among wealthy people, especially middle-aged women. (Middle-age is the peak obesity prevalence in all populations, and wealthy people tend to access calorie-dense, ultra-processed foods first, Swinburn said, but women may transition before men for physiological reasons – they have higher levels of fat for any BMI.) In stage two, as countries get wealthier, obesity prevalence rates continue to rise, and men start to catch up to women, as do lower socioeconomic groups. At stage three, the gaps between the sexes narrow and a flip occurs in the socio-economic gradient — obesity rates continue to rise but predominantly among lower-income people. By then, obesity has taken off. Eventually, rates in growth settle, to be followed by stage four — declines in prevalence. But again, we’re not quite there yet: No country is declining or projected to decline, according to the World Obesity Federation.

See also  Dow Jones Futures Fall After Nasdaq Bounces, Amazon Jumps; Market Pullback Likely Isn't Over

What’s behind the slowdown in BMI growth in wealthier countries? For Popkin, it’s all about market penetration. “Higher-income countries like the U.S. have had a high consumption [of ultra-processed foods] for 20 years, 30 years,” and consumption isn’t going to change much, whereas it’s only starting to take off in low- and middle-income countries. Swinburn thinks one driver might be that the messages about obesity prevention have started to get through, even in the absence of government policy, at least in some groups. “Some countries are showing reductions amongst preschool children, especially from well-off households,” he said. “So they’re going to be the first group that come out of this epidemic and start to show decreases in prevalence.”

What’s clear, they said, is that policy action is needed urgently given the health and economic costs of obesity. But even with strong evidence that the food environment is driving obesity rates up, policymakers — stifled by pressure from the food industry, and perhaps a lack of political will — have made little headway.

Low- and middle-income countries are now following the lead rich countries took in the epidemic, and experiencing the steepest increases in their obesity rates. Nine of the 10 countries poised to see the greatest increases in obesity prevalence are considered low- and middle-income, in Asia and Africa, according to the World Obesity Federation.

Some argue that since it’s food, and it’s everywhere, it’s difficult to regulate. But Swinburn pointed out that smoking was once common, even in doctor offices as it was on airplanes. After taxes increased the cost of cigarettes and regulations curtailed smoking in public places and tobacco marketing, social norms shifted, and consumption rates dropped. “When people say, well, [food is] not the same as tobacco, because we don’t need to smoke — we don’t actually need ultra-processed foods either. And so taxing, restricting marketing, keeping them out of schools, all of those sorts of policies, they’d go a long way.”

Your story

Do you have an experience you would like to share with us about taking Wegovy, Ozempic or other new weight loss drugs, prescribing them, or working on their development? Please fill out the form below, and a reporter may get in touch with you. We will not share your name or story without your permission.

*Required

Other parts of this series examine the new message pharma companies are promoting about obesity; attempts to personalize obesity treatment; the flawed origins the body mass index; the debate over new childhood obesity guidelines; weight stigma even within treatment for eating disorders; and drugs that are trying to leapfrog Wegovy and Ozempic. Read more about The Obesity Revolution.

STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism

BMI Countries Isnt Obesity plateau rich solved starting
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

Why Low-Stress Isn’t Always Low Risk

May 1, 2025

Why ASEAN Countries Often Run Trade Surpluses

April 15, 2025

Business Giants, Foreign Countries Have Already Committed To Pouring Over $1 Trillion Into US Since Trump’s Return

March 3, 2025

‘DEI Isn’t For Us’: Some Black-Owned Businesses Say Diversity Policies Don’t Work

February 18, 2025
Add A Comment

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Posts

Putin Celebrates Crushing Wagner Mutiny with Schoolgirl Selfies

July 3, 2023

Disney’s ‘She-Hulk’ Star Mark Ruffalo Pleads With Followers to ‘Organize the Vote’ After Series of SCOTUS Rulings

July 5, 2023

Salmonella Outbreak Linked To Small Turtles Spans 11 States

August 26, 2023

Western Companies Slowly Turn Away From China Amid Rising Tensions

September 25, 2023
Don't Miss

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

Business May 8, 2025

President Donald Trump announced Thursday the U.S. has reached a trade agreement with the U.K.,…

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025

Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

May 7, 2025
About
About

This is your World, Tech, Health, Entertainment and Sports website. We provide the latest breaking news straight from the News industry.

We're social. Connect with us:

Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest
Categories
  • Business (4,110)
  • Entertainment (4,220)
  • Finance (3,202)
  • Health (1,938)
  • Lifestyle (1,626)
  • Politics (3,084)
  • Sports (4,036)
  • Tech (2,006)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • World (3,944)
Our Picks

TikTok cracks down on users posting about weight loss drugs

July 22, 2023

UNLV Freshman Defensive Lineman Ryan Keeler Dies at 20

March 7, 2023

Retailers Are Rethinking Self-Checkouts Due to Rampant Theft

December 23, 2023
Popular Posts

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
© 2025 Patriotnownews.com - All rights reserved.
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.