One in five adults may be obese by 2025, says survey

PARIS: One in five adults could be obese by 2025, said a major survey Friday that warned of a looming epidemic of “severe obesity” with significant health and economic costs.
The ratio of obese adults has more than doubled in the 40 years since 1975, and will climb further in the coming nine, the research showed.
Of about five billion adults alive in 2014, 641 million were obese, it found. The figure was set to exceed 1.1 billion by 2025.
“There will be health consequences of magnitudes that we do not know,” author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London told AFP of the research published by The Lancet medical journal.
“Obesity and especially severe and morbid obesity, affect many organs and physiological processes.
“We can deal with some of these, like higher cholesterol or blood pressure, through medicines. But for many others, including diabetes, we don’t have effective treatment.”
People are divided into healthy or unhealthy weight categories based on a universally-adopted measure dubbed Body Mass Index (BMI), a ratio of weight-to-height squared.
A healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9.
One is considered underweight below 18.5, overweight from 25 up, and obese from 30 — when the risk of diabetes, stroke, heart disease and some cancers escalates massively.
With a BMI of 35 one is categorized as severely obese, and from 40 upward as morbidly so.
Among men globally, obesity tripled from 3.2 percent of the population in 1975 to 10.8 percent in 2014 (some 266 million), and among women it rose from 6.4 percent to 14.9 percent (375 million), said the survey — 12.9 percent combined.
This was equivalent to the average adult, 18 and older, being 1.5 kilos (3.3 pounds) heavier every decade.
“If the rate of obesity continues at this pace, by 2025 roughly a fifth of men (18 percent) and women (21 percent) will be obese,” according to a statement by The Lancet.