Obesity a growing threat to world healthThe world is round and so are a growing number of its inhabitants. In fact, obesity is spreading at an alarming rate, not just in industrialized countries but in developing countries, where obesity often sits next to malnutrition. “This places an additional economic burden on poorer countries that they can ill afford, ” according to Marquisa LaVelle, a biological anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island and organizer of a symposium on the worldwide epidemic of obesity for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Scientists are documenting the global “fat” problem from China to Australia to Egypt to remote islands of the Pacific and beyond. In 1995, there were an estimated 200 million obese adults and 22 million obese children worldwide. By 2000, the number had skyrocketed to more than 300 million. In developing countries, it is now estimated that more than 115 million people suffer from obesity-related problems, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and obesity-related cancers. In the U.S. alone, child obesity has increased by more than 1 percent per year over the past decade with an estimated $99.2 billion in future health care costs, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“We’re looking at a ticking time bomb of chronic disease,” LaVelle said, noting that a recent World Health Organization study found that obesity is now estimated to have increased 50 percent over the past seven to ten years.
“This rapid change cannot be explained by a lack of personal willpower or changes in the human gene pool,” the URI scientist said, “because it is happening so fast and has become so widespread. Rather the epidemic is part of a century-long trend of increased growth in height, weight and earlier puberty in children that has been associated with transitions to industrialized lifestyles.”
For example, in 1860 girls in England reached puberty between 14 and 15. Now the average age is 12.3. LaVelle studied three generations of women - grandmothers, mothers, and daughters — in Michigan and found that the age of puberty had decreased within families by a full two years since 1890. There is also a correlation with fatness. In this case, girls who reach puberty earlier are likely to be chubbier and have heavier children, both sons and daughters.
Among poorer nations, adoption of industrialized foods and food preferences, together with drastically decreased physical activity levels are the basic ingredients for accelerating obesity, especially among children and adolescents, said LaVelle. Within developing countries, shifts to urbanization, non-manual labor, high calorie foods, and higher levels of sedentary living are all contributing to this growing problem, often in conjunction with undernourished segments of the population. “We assume in developing countries that the problem is one of under-nutrition rather than over-nutrition, but many countries now have both,” said LaVelle.
By Jan Wenzel
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