I see that, in Mexico, two thirds of the pop is overweight. Hmmmm.... I also noticed some research at medline indicating that Finnish teens saw a rapid increase in fatness and obesity, with the same pattern of gains concentrated among the already fat in a similarly short time frame. The other international study pointed out that obesity was correlated with low birth weights (which are correlated with poverty). It is also speculated that such children's metabolisms adapt to low birth weight via the 'thrifty gene' phenom. Also, China seems to have undergone it's own obesity 'epidemic' with the number of overweight ppl growing by 10%. Nearly half of the adults 35+ are overweight. Dayum. Apparently, though, USers eat fewer kcals than the Chinese.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9700248%255E23289,00.html Worldwide obesity epidemic: http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/content/short/9/suppl_4/S228
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-05-08-global-obesity_x.htm
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Certainly the United States - home of the Whopper and the Super Big Gulp - remains a nation of scale-busters, with two of every three Americans overweight.
But there are a dozen places even worse. South Pacific islands like Tonga, Kosrae and Nauru, where traditional meals of reef fish and taro are replaced by cheap instant noodles and deep-fried turkey tails.
Greece, birthplace of the Olympic Games. Kuwait and other wealthy, oil-soaked Gulf States.
Soon China will be the world's biggest country in more ways than sheer population, experts predict. It's a stunning reversal from the Mao Zedong era when as many as 40 million people starved in the Great Leap Forward famine of 1958-61. <...> The global trend toward weight gain and its associated illnesses is not restricted to the well-off. High-fat, high-starch foods tend to be cheaper, so poor people eat more of them.
In Mexico, 40 percent of its 105 million people live in poverty. Yet two-thirds of men and women there are overweight or obese.
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Results: The mean (age-adjusted) BMI increased by +0.32 kg/m2 per 10 years in boys and by +0.24 kg/m2 per 10 years in girls, increases that were remarkable in small towns. The prevalence of obese boys and girls increased from 6.1% and 7.1%, respectively, in the time-period 1976 to 1980, to 11.1% and 10.2% in 1996 to 2000. The increasing trend was most evident in 9- to 11-year-old children of both sexes living in small towns, whereas no changes were observed in girls in metropolitan areas. Discussion: Our data clearly show increasing trends in obesity prevalence in Japanese school children. Degrees of the increasing trends, however, differed across sex and age groups and residential areas, demonstrating a particular phenomenon that girls in metropolitan areas were unlikely to become obese. These epidemiological aspects indicate the priorities for intervention in population strategies to control obesity in children.
Data for US Children: Among adolescents ages 12-19, the following are overweight, using the 95th percentile of BMI values on the CDC 2000 growth chart:
* For whites (only), 13.0 percent of boys and 12.2 percent of girls.
* For blacks or African Americans (only), 20.5 percent of boys and 25.7 percent of girls.
* For Mexicans, 27.5 percent of boys and 19.4 percent of girls.
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'