According to an international team of scientists from New Zealand and Australia, up to 76% of the world’s population is overfat. This amounts to an astonishing 5.5 billion people.

“The overfat pandemic has not spared those who exercise or even compete in sports,” said Dr. Philip Maffetone, CEO of MAFF Fitness Pty Ltd in Sydney, Australia.

Dr. Maffetone and his colleagues from the Auckland University of Technology and MAFF Fitness put forth a specific notion of overfat — a condition of having sufficient excess body fat to impair health — in their article published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Based on a new look into current data, the team argues how, in addition to those who are overweight and obese, others falling into the overfat category include normal-weight people.

“For the first time in human history, the number of obese people worldwide now exceeds those who are underweight,” Dr. Maffetone and co-authors noted.

“However, it is possible that there is an even more serious problem — an overfat pandemic comprised of people who exhibit metabolic health impairments associated with excess fat mass relative to lean body mass.”

“Many overfat individuals, however, are not necessarily classified clinically as overweight or obese, despite the common use of body mass index as the clinical classifier of obesity and overweight.”

“The well-documented obesity epidemic may merely be the tip of the overfat iceberg.”

“We want to bring awareness of the rise in these risk factors, where the terms ‘overfat’ and ‘underfat’ describe new body composition states,” Dr. Maffetone explained.

“We hope the terms will enter into common usage, to help create substantive improvements in world health.”

The study also indicates that 9 to 10% of the world population may be underfat.

“While we think of the condition of underfat as being due to starvation, those worldwide numbers are dropping rapidly,” Dr. Maffetone said.

“However, an aging population, an increase in chronic disease and a rising number of excessive exercisers or those with anorexia athletica, are adding to the number of non-starving underfat individuals.”

This leaves as little as 14% of the world’s population with normal body-fat percentage.

“This is a global concern because of its strong association with rising chronic disease and climbing healthcare costs, affecting people of all ages and incomes,” Dr. Maffetone concluded.

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Philip B. Maffetone et al. Overfat and Underfat: New Terms and Definitions Long Overdue. Front. Public Health, published online January 3, 2017; doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2016.00279