Obesity: Recent Developments

In 2011 the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet reported on studies which found that obesity has almost doubled worldwide since 1980, “when 4.8 percent of men and 7.9 percent of women were obese. In 2008, 9.8 percent of men and 13.8 percent of women in the world were obese.” An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, and that number is rising in nearly every country in the world. For the first time in history the number of overweight people in the world exceeds the number of malnourished and underfed.