Over one in eight adults are now obese - a ratio that has
more than doubled since 1975 and will swell to one in five by 2025, a major
survey reported Friday.
Of about five billion adults alive in 2014, 641 million were
obese, the data showed - and projected
the number will balloon past 1.1 billion in just nine years, an online report
said.
The research warned of a looming crisis of ‘severe obesity’
and disease brought on by high-fat, high-sugar diets causing blood pressure and
cholesterol to rise.
"There will be health consequences of magnitudes that
we do not know," author Majid
Ezzati of Imperial College London told AFP.
The survey, published in The
Lancet medical journal, claimed to be the most comprehensive of its kind
conducted to date.
People are divided into healthy or unhealthy weight
categories based on a universally-adopted measure dubbed Body Mass Index (BMI) -
a ratio of weight-to-height squared.
A healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9.
One is considered underweight below 18.5, overweight from 25
up, and obese from 30 - when the risk of
diabetes, stroke, heart disease and some cancers escalates massively.
