India is the third-most obese country on earth, with more than 30 million people suffering from obesity and one in every five Indians overweight. Yet India also happens to be the second-most populous nation on earth, so the extent of its obesity epidemic is a little distorted. And according to data compiled by Ramon Martinez, a technical specialist at the World Health Organisation, India is not even the most overweight nation in the neighbourhood – at least going by prevalence figures rather than absolute numbers. That would be Afghanistan.

Martinez put together a series of visualisations, based on WHO and other data as of 2013. He defines overweight and obese in WHO terms, which defines overweight as people with a Body Mass Index of 25 and over, and obese as those with BMIs of more than 30. The numbers were generated as part of the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2013, published in Lancet, which estimated the prevalence of overweight and obesity among people in 188 countries.


Since the data compiled was separated into that involving adults (anyone over 20) and that involving children (from ages 2 to 19), it's possible to see that the trends in South Asia are replicated no matter the age. As with adults, the prevalence of overweight and obese children is higher in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in India.

Helpfully, the Global Burden of Disease Survey didn't just collect information in 2013, it also compiled data over the last two decades, starting in 1990. Putting that information together allows you to figure out what was the growth in prevalence of obesity and overweight people in South Asia. Here it becomes clear that for some countries, like China and Bangladesh, the issue is new and has grown at a massive rate recently. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, however, it is growing relatively slower.



The countries sitting at the top of the overweight/obese heap are small island nations, like Tonga, Samoa and Kiribati, where almost 80% of the people are overweight or worse. This is followed up by West Asian nations like Qatar, Kuwait and Libya, which also see more than 70% of their populations overweight. The United States comes in at 27. At the bottom are nations like North Korea, Ethiopia and Timor-Leste, with fewer than 6% of their populations considered fat.


Another interesting point in the data is how it splits up across genders. The survey allows you to look at the estimated prevalence of overweight and obese adults across the world, and to divide this up by gender, revealing that in many cases in the region women appear to far outweigh men. Iran in particular, has a huge gap between the two sexes.

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