The latest estimates are staggering: 1.7 billion people worldwide are overweight or obese. The London-based International Obesity TaskForce said the revised figure-50 percent higher than previous estimates-reflects a deliberate ignorance on the part of most governments in facing one of the biggest universal risks to health worldwide.
In the United States, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable deaths. According to the American Obesity Association, about 69 million Americans are overweight and 51 million are obese. These numbers have been rising steadily-61 percent of American adults aged twenty years and older are overweight, and 26 percent are obese. Overweight/obesity causes at least 300,000 excess deaths annually in the United States, burdening the nation with a healthcare tab of more than $100 billion each year. The nation's military is not immune to the obesity epidemic sweeping the United States. Despite the rigors of basic training and regular field exercises, 54 percent of military personnel are overweight and 6.2 percent are obese. Obesity affects military performance: obese soldiers have higher risk of heat injury and increased musculoskeletal injuries.
In Europe, an estimated 20 percent of residents are obese and many more are overweight. Professor Andrew Prentice from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine cites obesity as the single most greatest threat to the gains in longevity made during the last 100 years. He observes that people are getting fatter, not taller, at a much younger age. Thanks to high-fat fast-food diets, exercising less, and spending more time indoors in front of computers and televisions, adolescents are packing on the pounds at younger and younger ages, and are likely to remain overweight/obese into adulthood. As a result, some British nutritionists expect many parents to outlive their children. In Britain, the National Audit Office reports that about 30,000 people die of obesity-related causes each year, cutting short their lives by about nine years.
Newest recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO) may add another half-billion to the tally of overweight/obese people worldwide. A WHO expert group found that a lower body mass index threshold (23.3, rather than 30 for non-Asian populations) can put Asians at an increased risk for obesity-related health risks. This prompted the group to propose that WHO adopts a revised definition of obesity that is specific to Asian populations to accommodate the body mass index difference. That would mean that of the world's 6.3 billion residents, 2.2 billion-more than one in three-are overweight or obese.
