Obesity isn’t just a problem for rich countries (Image: Wang Zhide/ChinaFotoPress/Getty)

Much of the world should go on a diet in 2014. More than a third of adults globally were estimated to be overweight or obese in 2008, according to a report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a think tank in London. That’s a 23 per cent increase on 1980.

In the last three decades, the number of adults estimated to be obese in the developing world has almost quadrupled to 904 million, overtaking the number in rich countries.

“The most shocking thing is the degree to which obesity is now affecting developing as well as developed economies,” says Tim Lobstein of the International Association for the Study of Obesity in London. “The problems caused by overconsumption of fats and sugars are now global, not just Western, problems.”


The rise is linked to a “creeping homogenisation” of diets across the world, says the report, which says rising incomes, advertising and globalisation all play a part.

It criticises policy-makers in most countries for being slow or unwilling to tackle the problem. “We see a big gap in what governments recommend people eat as part of their nutrition campaigns and what people actually eat,” says Sharada Keats of the ODI, a co-author. “We need governments to acknowledge the scale of the problem and start putting in place stronger steps to tackle it.”

Growing trend

Some countries have managed to go against the grain and improve diets. For example, South Koreans ate four times more fruit in 2008 than they did in 1980. The report attributes this to government health drives, which include training programmes on how to prepare low-fat meals, showing what governments can do when they act.

The report’s figures are based on trends extrapolated using body mass index data from 199 countries.

Given that there are very few bits of hard evidence of obesity prevalence available historically in such a wide range of countries, the authors of the report have made pretty good use of the data, says Lobstein.

Although the change is most pronounced in the developing world, the US remains the fattest country with 71 per cent of its population obese or overweight. The UK is ranked a weighty fourth with 64 per cent.

In 2006, the World Health Organization predicted that obesity in the developing world would overtake that in rich countries by 2010.