DAVOS: Obesity has become a global pandemic that could leave more than half of all adults worldwide overweight within two decades, experts said, calling for urgent action beyond just blaming people for lacking willpower.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum here, health, nutrition and fitness experts said the world’s increasingly deadly obesity crisis needs to be tackled with the same determination policy-makers once took to fighting smoking.
With our food more and more unhealthy and our lives increasingly sedentary, answers are needed to address a crisis that is driving up diabetes, boosting heart disease and already killing 2.8 million adults per year, they said.
The current figure of 1.4 billion adults already overweight globally is set to soar, Linda Fried, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, told a panel on obesity at the annual gathering of the global elite. “In another 20 years, if things continue to increase the way they are, it may well be that 50-60 percent of the world’s adult population will be overweight,” Fried said.
“If this were an infectious disease we might call it a pandemic. It’s not regional, it’s global, it’s increasing rapidly, it’s continuing to escalate — those are the basic definitions of a pandemic,” she said.
The first step to resolving the crisis, the experts said, is overcoming the instinctive reaction many have to obesity — blaming the obese themselves instead of the conditions around them. “In 30 years, the percent of the world’s population that is overweight or obese has doubled,” Fried said. “There’s no evidence that there has been a collective global loss of willpower.”
The blame rests instead with the easy availability — and relative cheapness — of higher-calorie foods and increasing urbanisation that has led to less active lifestyles, the experts said.
Lisa MacCallum Carter, Nike’s Vice-President for Access to Sport, said obesity was linked to an “inactivity crisis” as a result of urbanisation. She said significant amounts of daily exercise from incidental movement had been lost, with for example people now sending emails instead of walking across the office to talk to a colleague.
She cited research showing that Americans are now 32 percent less active than in 1967, and if current trends continue they will be 50 percent less active by 2030. In just half a generation, she said, the Chinese had also become 45 percent less active. AFP
