Study: Alarming rise in obesity

Overweight people make up almost a third of the world's population or two billion, according to a study in the medical journal The Lancet. Since 1980, obesity has soared in all countries, especially among children.

Deutsche Welle, 29 May 2014

A survey of 188 nations compiled by US health researchers and published Thursday concludes that no country has turned the tide on obesity since 1980. The largest weight gains had occurred in the Middle East and northern Africa.

Worldwide, the prevalence of obese and overweight adults had grown by 28 percent over the three decades, and by nearly 50 percent among children.

Excess body weight had also led to 3.4 million deaths worldwide in 2010, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study compiled by the University of Washington's Institute for Health and Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

More than half of those persons rated as overweight or obese live in 10 countries, topped by the United States, and followed by China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan and Indonesia.

Rising risk among children

Nearly a quarter of all children in rich, developed countries and 13 percent in developing nations were overweight or obese, said the study published by the British medical journal The Lancet.

"Particularly high rates of child and adolescent obesity were seen in Middle Eastern and North African countries, notably among girls," the study notes.

'All ages and incomes'

"Obesity is an issue affecting people of all ages and incomes, everywhere," said Christopher Murray, the IHME director who helped collate the data for the period 1980 to 2013.

"It's pretty grim," said Murray, adding that there was strong evidential links between income and obesity; as people got richer.

Not a single country had recorded a significant decline in obesity and that indicated "how hard a challenge this is," he said.

Scientists had noticed accompanying spikes in diabetes, he said, and rising rates of cancers linked to weight such as pancreatic cancer.

Collated data from 188 countries

Murray, lead author Marie Ng and their colleagues reviewed data from more than 1,700 studies conducted over three decades.

Their most striking findings include more than 50 percent obesity in the Pacific island nation of Tonga and similar dangerous overweight level among half of all women in Kuwait, Libya, Qatar and Samoa.

The study's authors said the World Health Organization's goal of halting the rise in obesity by 2015 appeared "very ambitious."

No more excuses

One of the study's commentators, Klim McPherson of Oxford University called for an international drive to change damaging consumption and life styles that also lead to obesity-related cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis and kidney disease.

"Politicians can no longer hide behind ignorance and confusion," he said.

Next to inappropriate nutition and too little exercise, excess weight is attributed to stress, centain medications, lack of sleep and genetic predispositions.

Researchers use weight-to-height measures. An overweight person has a ratio of 25 or over. An obese person has a ratio of 30 upward.

ipj/jm (dpa, AFP, AP)

Related Articles:

Kryon Q&A

(13) Question: Dear Kryon, I’m very concerned about the obesity epidemic, particularly in the U.S. Around me I see people getting bigger and more unhealthy, all for the sake of convenience and saving time. You mentioned at one point a famine, and I suspect the famine won’t be from a lack of food, but from an abundance of food that has no nutritional value.

I wonder how we can honor the Earth by eating nothing that comes straight from it? Of course this involves caring for the lands and oceans as part of a bigger issue and making that connection, too. Is this what it will finally take for people to switch to a healthier way of living?

Its amazing how detached people are from the food they eat. We don’t even honor our digestive processes, the way we combine foods. Whatever happened to nutrition? Atkins is no solution; there is no balance in it. Gastric bypass is all about quantity reduction, not quality increase. When will people make the direct connection between what/how they eat and their health? Is a change in diet and lifestyle part of the upcoming shift?

Answer: The shift has little to do with it. It’s a culture-specific problem and has to do with consciousness of health. Go study the cultures on your planet that have very few overweight Humans. Start with the Japanese. They have some of the same western work ethics and live in very sophisticated industrial-based environments. Yet they aren’t overweight. It’s about the core food groups and the combination of them.

(39) Question: Dear Kryon: I've noticed how many children are developing severe allergies to foods (my daughter included). When I've researched this, it seems that most of the allergies are essentially to seeds, grains, legumes, eggs, and dairy. I've noticed that these foods all hold the potential for life, or in the case of dairy, are essentially used to sustain the first stages of life in an animal's baby. My feeling is that because we're not releasing the life force within these foods (that is, sprouting, etc.), they're becoming harmful to us. I would like your impressions of this.

Answer: For thousands of years, these foods have worked for humanity. In these cases you speak about, the main culprit continues to be the way in which these foods are collected and processed. You won't find these allergies in third-world countries, and you won't find them within the children who work on farms, where they eat the foods directly. There will eventually have to come a day when you relax some of your efficiency attributes and go back to the way food was meant to be collected and eaten. And yes... there are effects from how the dairy animals are treated, too. Going back to some basics will help, and so will eliminating some of the procedures that supposedly create a "safer food." These procedures have instead made them begin to look like foreign food to the Human body.

(15) Question: Dear Kryon, please help us understand the increase of allergies. What can we do to heal this phenomenon?

Answer: Reduce the steps in your food chain, which are adding chemistry to fresh food.