They probably speak English Phanie/Alamy Stock Photo

We’re getting fatter. The number of people who are classified as obese has rocketed from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, according to an analysis of body mass index (BMI) trends.

Majid Ezzati at Imperial College London and his team have analysed data from 1698 population-based studies of 19.2 million men and women from 186 countries.


This interactive sunburst chart shows how BMI has changed over the past 40 years globally. The different colours and the innermost of the concentric circles in the chart represent different geographical regions. Click on each section to zoom into that region’s breakdown. When you hit the play button (bottom left) the chart animates to show how BMI has changed between 1975 and 2014, for men and women.

It shows that about a fifth (118 million) of the world’s obese adults are in six rich English-speaking countries – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and the US. And some 50 million of the world’s severely obese people live in these countries.

The percentage of men who were obese in 2014 (10.7%) is three times what it was in 1975 (3.3%) and the proportion of women who were obese in 2014 (14.9%) was twice what it was in 1975 (6.4%).

Of these countries, the US has the highest of average BMI both for men and women. More than one in four severely obese men and about one in five severely obese women in the world live in the US. The UK comes next, followed by Canada.

The team predicts that, by 2025, about 43% of US women and 45% of US men could be obese. The UK is estimated to have the highest levels (38%) of obese women in Europe.

The first map below shows mean BMI changing over time, the second shows obesity prevalence over the 40 years.

For more maps and data go to ncdrisc.org.

Journal reference: The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30054-X