Obesity

Every nation on Earth is getting fatter. Forty percent of adults on the planet are already overweight or obese and more are joining their ranks every day. While the world’s bulging waistlines are driven by economic success — wealthy populations eat more — obesity’s estimated cost of $2 trillion a year worldwide is now almost as much of a financial burden as smoking.

Much of the energy in the fight against fat is focused on sugar right now. In October 2016, the World Health Organization urged all nations to consider a tax on sugary drinks. Mexico, Norway and the U.K. have already done so. In the U.S., the cities of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boulder, Colorado, have passed soda taxes. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will require new food labels by July 2018 that will differentiate between naturally occurring sugar, as in raisins, and sugar that’s added. Companies are feeling the pressure: PepsiCo says that it will cut back on added sugar in its beverages. Whether sugar is the prime culprit or not, the effect of decades of weight gain is being felt worldwide: There were 114 countries where more than half the adult population was overweight in 2014, including much of the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. In the U.S., the average American woman now weighs 166 pounds, about equal to what the average American man weighed in the 1960s. In China, one-fifth of all children are overweight. In Mexico, more than 70 percent of adults are overweight. Researchers estimate that excess weight caused 3.4 million premature deaths worldwide in 2010. Not surprisingly, rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease are on the rise. An estimated 422 million adults had diabetes in 2014, a rate of about 8.5 percent, compared with 4.7 percent in 1980.