Worldwide, more people are obese than starving now

by Martha Edwards (Subscribe to Martha Edwards's posts)
Oct 18th 2007 6:28PM

Famine and starvation in developing countries is one of the mos devastating global issues of the last few decades. But there's an even bigger crisis looming -- obesity in developing countries. Dubbed globesity, Diet Blog has an interesting article on the increasing phenomenon.

Here are some interesting stats:

Worldwide, 1.3 billion people are obese. The number of people that are starving? 800 million.
Even the poorest nations in the world are facing alarming obesity rates
Poor nations also have access to more technology than one would think -- and it's halting the amount of exercise people are getting.

Ideally, the majority of people would be a healthy weight across the board, in all countries. Instead, we have some sort of bizarre dichotomy going on here -- obese vs. starving, with obesity slowing winning the race. It's disturbing, if you ask me. What do you think?

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Comments (2)

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Scott Ensink 10-19-2007 @ 8:26AM

It's not a good sign. But I think we need to keep it in perspective: obesity is (mostly) self-inflicted. Starvation is not.

Jen 10-19-2007 @ 11:14AM

I think that obesity is largely the result of highly processed foods and food additives such as MSG. The industrialized foods are now reaching more countries and the spread of obesity is the result. If you think about how the large corporations mass produce foods as cheaply as possible, it makes sense that these cheap processed foods would have a ready market in poor countries. Not that prosperity renders people immune to the influence of the food corporations, it requires time and effort to prepare whole foods and people have become accustomed to the ease of processed food.

Jen
http://www.jstevens.wordpress.com