Obesity 151How Common Is Obesity?
In the UK, rates of obesity are on the increase. If obesity is defined as a
BMI greater than 30, reports show that in 1980, 6 percent of men and
8 percent of women were obese; in 1993, 13 percent of men and 16 percent
of women were obese; and in 1996, this had risen further, to 16 percent
of men and 18 percent of women (Department of Health, 1995; Prescott-
Clarke and Primatesta, 1998). By 2005 this had further increased to 23 per-
cent of men and 25 percent of women (Health Survey for England, 2006).
Despite obesity still being more prevalent in women, the recent increase
for men is greater than for women. The Department of Health predicts
that if this trend continues, by 2010 6.6 million men and 6 million women
will be obese in the UK. For children in England, Chinn and Rona (2001)
reported that in 1994, 9 percent of boys and 13.5 percent of girls were
overweight, that 1.7 percent of boys and 2.6 percent of girls were obese,
and that these figures were more than 50 percent higher than 10 years earlier.
Estimates for the US suggest that roughly half of American adults are over-
weight, that a third are obese, that women particularly have grown heavier
in recent years, and that the prevalence of overweight children has doubled
in the past 20 years (Flegal, Harlan, and Landis, 1988; Kuczmarski et al.,
1994; Ogden et al., 1997, 2007; National Institutes of Health, 1998). Across
the world, the World Health Organization (WHO, 2006) estimates that
1.5 billion adults worldwide are overweight and 400 million are obese.
The highest rates of obesity are found in Tunisia, the US, Saudi Arabia,
and Canada, and the lowest are found in China, Mali, Japan, Sweden, and
Brazil; the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are all placed in the middle of
the range. Across Europe the highest rates are in Lithuania, Malta, Russia,
and Serbia, and the lowest are in Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, and the UK
(WHO Europe, 2007). Even though the rates are low in China and Japan,
they are steadily increasing, and reports indicate that the prevalence of
childhood obesity has tripled in Japan and that 1 in 10 children in China
is now obese (Ogden et al., 2007). Overall, people in northern and western
Europe are thinner than in eastern and southern Europe, and women are
more likely to be obese than men. In general, BMI increases with age for
both men and women until age 64, when it decreases slightly into old age.
The prevalence of obesity is slightly higher in women, particularly working-
class women, but lower in vegetarians and smokers regardless of their sex
(Fehily, 1999).