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David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Inside Out | Obesity is now a big fat global problem, especially for children

  • The face of the 1 billion-strong obesity epidemic is changing, with rates surging across the developing world and growing faster globally for the young than for adults
  • In Hong Kong, in particular, three years of lockdowns and school closures worsened obesity rates for children

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Obese Chinese boys exercise with a coach at a summer camp in Zhengzhou, Henan, in July 2017. Summer camps have sprouted up across the country in recent years to help fat children lose weight. Photo: Visual China Group via Getty Images
David Dodwell
March 4 marks World Obesity Day, and a sobering moment to ponder the reality that more than 1 billion people worldwide are obese. The price tag linked to illnesses caused or aggravated by obesity is estimated to rise from around US$2 trillion a year to over US$4.3 trillion by 2035, according to the World Obesity Federation.
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Long regarded as a problem concentrated in the wealthy Western economies, obesity has become endemic in the developing world and is increasingly a problem for children, according to a Lancet study released last week.

The study, undertaken by 1,500 researchers and conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organization, comprised 3,663 studies and 222 million participants. Tracking the progress of the obesity epidemic from 1990-2022, it calculates that one in eight people worldwide are obese (with a body mass index of 30 or more). Since 1990, the obesity rate has doubled for women (18.5 per cent) and tripled for men (14 per cent).

Alarmingly, the obesity rate has quadrupled for children and adolescents. Among those aged five to 19, 6.9 per cent of girls and 9.3 per cent of boys are obese. This growing population is at risk of the early onset of ailments from hypertension and cardiac problems to diabetes and cancers.

If there is any good news at all from the study, which also tracked the world’s underweight population (with BMI under 18.5), it is that the world’s underweight population has fallen to 532 million, down 127 million from 1990. This is no doubt due to falling poverty over the past three decades.

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“We tended to think of obesity as a problem of the rich. Now [it’s] a problem of the world,” said Dr Francesco Branca, WHO’s director of nutrition and health, and a co-author of the study.

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