What’s the depressing news this Thursday?

Here we go: Obesity is rising alarmingly across the globe. In fact, it has risen by nearly half over the past two decades.

Says who?

A new study in the medical journal, The Lancet . The study has found that obesity and the diseases it brings — diabetes, for one — are spreading widely across developing countries. This is not your run-of-the-mill study; it is reportedly the largest analysis of global disability data to date, drawing on over 35,000 data sources in 188 countries. It was led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

I know the rich countries have seen a rise in the number of obese people....

That’s been around for several decades; but now poorer countries are joining Club Fat. The new hotspots are China, Mexico and India. The study found there has been a 45 per cent rise in the prevalence of diabetes worldwide from 1990 to 2013.

Nearly all the rise was in Type 2, usually linked to obesity and is the most common. Interestingly, the findings seem to endorse what the WHO said in 2014; the UN health agency had found obesity more than doubled worldwide since 1980. In 2014, some 1.9 billion adults were overweight, of them 600 million were obese.

Seems we’re eating wrong.

Exactly. The scientists say the developing world is witnessing a big shift; while deaths from communicable diseases such as malaria and TB have fallen, chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes are rising alarmingly.

Let me guess. Economic growth has a role here.

Yes. We seem to have got fatter, not stronger. India has the third-highest number of obese and overweight people (20 per cent of all adults) after the US and China. Our country is home to about 65 million diabetes patients, and about 80 per cent of these cases are driven by obesity. Such an irony, given that almost a third of our population lives in poverty, and one in two urban poor children is underweight.

Are we the worst off?

There’s some solid competition. In China, the prevalence of diabetes went up by 56 per cent over the period of the Lancet study. But leading the fat pack is the US, where the rate rose 71 per cent and in Saudi Arabia, 60 per cent.

In Mexico, it went up 52 per cent. Saudi Arabia led the pack in terms of overall prevalence with 17,817 cases per 100,000 people in 2013. That’s more than double China’s 6,480.

Can’t improvements in healthcare check this spike?

To be fair, deaths from diabetes have come down globally thanks to advances in medical sciences. The scientists say people with diabetes are now living longer than their counterparts in, say, the 1980s. This also means countries are now spending more on obesity and diabetes.

A study in PubMed has forecast that the global health expenditure on diabetes might cross $500 billion by 2030. In 2010, globally, expenses on diabetes accounted for 12 per cent of the health expenditures of individuals. And, mind you, this is only going up.

Can’t you give me some good to chew on?

Well, just this week, a new study presented at the British Cardiovascular Society Conference says that being obese could actually help improve chances of survival after a heart attack because excess fat appears to fight heart disease.

Scientists were always puzzled about why most overweight people live longer after a cardiac arrest than someone with a healthy body mass index.

They called it ‘the obesity paradox’. Now the new study says fat surrounding damaged blood vessels releases chemicals that starts to battle heart disease.

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