Stopping the growth in recent decades of obesity, which for the World Health Organization (WHO) has reached global epidemic proportions, is one of the global nutrition objectives for 2025. And it is the first major challenge of the Acceleration Plan to stop obesity, approved at the 2022 WHO assembly.
We have just learned that since that year, more than 1 billion people around the world are obese, according to data from the latest studies, which reflect that obesity is the most common nutrition problem in most countries.
Previously associated with the first world, it is now prevalent in less developed countries and in lower-income social groups.
The World Health Organization defines overweight and obesity “as an abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat that may be harmful to health.”
The indicator used in adults to measure this excess fat, although it is actually excess weight, is the Body Mass Index (BMI).
This parameter is obtained by dividing the weight in kilograms by the square of the height and was created in 1832 by the Belgian mathematician, astronomer and statistician Lambert Adolphe Quetelet, who had nothing to do with health.
For the WHO, an adult is overweight if their BMI is equal to or greater than 25 and is obese if it reaches or exceeds an index of 30.
More information
Obesity is already the most common form of malnutrition in most countries
This parameter is increasingly questioned, but it continues to be used in the medical field, although it does not take into account age, sex, or race.
Its application is based on data from a Caucasian man, so it already ignores 52% of the world's population, women.
According to WHO data:
Since 1975, obesity has almost tripled worldwide.
In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults (39% of the total) were overweight, of which more than 650 million (13% of the total) were obese.
The majority of the world's population lives in countries where overweight and obesity claim more lives than being underweight.
In 2016, 41 million children under five were overweight or obese.
The figure rose to 340 million if we counted children and adolescents (from 5 to 19 years old).
These figures, which reflect a growth in overweight and obesity on a global scale, have led the World Health Organization to defend the epidemic label for obesity.
It is important to know that the WHO no longer describes obesity as a disease, but as a risk factor for developing other diseases, such as type II diabetes, heart disease, cardiovascular accidents and some types of cancer.
With this data, the logical thing would be to take measures, but from where?
The WHO promotes the involvement not only of the food industry, but also of governments, through investments in public health policies and the promotion of a healthy diet and a greater increase in physical activity.
Already in the
Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health
, adopted by its assembly in 2004, WHO described the measures needed to support healthy diets and regular physical activity.
According to the current global action plan approved at the 2022 assembly, a relative reduction of 30% in premature mortality due to non-communicable diseases and a reduction in obesity to reach the levels must be achieved no later than 2030. 2010 rates.
The reality is that malnutrition and undernutrition coexist around the corner, even in the same home.
You no longer have to go to Africa to see children going hungry, that is happening in the most developed countries.
Since the pandemic, economic, health and social resources have decreased significantly.
Due to inflation, food prices have increased abysmally: on average, around 14%;
and in foods such as chicken, oil, milk and eggs, up to 20%.
In Spain, food banks warned, in the months before the war in Ukraine, of a lower frequency of donations;
and, on the contrary, they had increased the number of food rations they offered each day.
Malnutrition and economic resources
With this panorama, healthy eating at an individual level will be greatly influenced by economic resources, education and health care.
It's not that eating healthy is very expensive, it's that you have to eat several times a day and feed all the members of the family.
Therefore, sometimes a package of cookies is chosen, based on price and not because of ignorance, since it can be a breakfast more times a week than a kilo of fruit.
Nutritional education continues outside the classrooms and public health: despite the fact that it is a request from the European Union, Spain is the only member that does not have the figure of the dietitian and the dietitian-nutritionist within public health in all provinces.
Not even in the capital, Madrid, are we part of it.
The former Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, called for the regulation in Spain of the advertising of unhealthy foods and drinks aimed at children, with the aim of promoting healthier lifestyle habits.
Finally, the proposal did not come out, it did not even have the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, so the industry continues as it did 15 years ago, regulating advertising based on its economic interest, without a health perspective.
Access to health is more difficult from public health and those who enjoy private insurance will be able to access medical care more effectively.
Again, money as a mediator in health.
Therefore, lower incomes are led to poorer nutrition, medical care, and fewer opportunities to engage in physical activity.
An individual approach to overweight and obesity is useless; we need a social and structural framework that supports and ensures access to health for everyone, through public policy measures.
Social researchers believe that the obesity epidemic has been sold in an alarmist way.
For example, Anu Harju warns that we are facing “a war against fat people and against fatness, as a medical, moral and socioeconomic problem, which the health authorities of Western countries have adopted with neoliberal measures of individual self-regulation of the subjects.” .
Neoliberalism applied to this issue has changed the “you are poor, because you want to” to “you are fat, because you want to and you don't make an effort.”
In addition to being cruel and devoid of social conscience, it denies bodily diversity.
We are turning health into something tremendously classist.
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