A study says that obesity affects 80% of adults
A paper from the Australian University of Auckland held that WHO statistics are incorrect because of the measurement system used. The troubling new figures
For the World Health Organization (WHO), overweight and obesity are already a global pandemic. Their statistics state that, by 2014, 39% of adults aged 18 and over were overweight, and 13% were obese. According to new work, these figures would be incorrect and very low.
A team of scientists at the Polytechnic University of Auckland, Australia, estimated that the obesity pandemic would be far more widespread than previously thought. The article, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, finds that in developed countries the percentage of obese people reaches 90% of adult men, 80% of women and 50% of children.
This new scenario lies in what researchers consider to be obesity. His thesis discredits the system of body mass index (BMI), a method that has more and more detractors, since it associates the height and weight of a person. According to specialists this formula does not always help to predict if a person is going to have health problems associated with being overweight. Instead, they used the indicator that marks the excess fat. To make this systemic barter ensure that various studies show that many individuals are considered thin or slightly overweight, even though they have a high fat percentage.
For the authors it is necessary to change the definition of obesity and not focus on body weight but on fat. The great impediment is that to accurately measure fat levels in the body, expensive and complex technological methods such as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry are needed.
The researchers said that this way of measuring obesity would drastically change many of the current statistics. For example, recent reports say that in the United States the problem of obesity is slowing down and would have stabilized in 35% of men and 40% among women. "However, the number of people who have percentages of body fat that can be harmful to health continues to increase," they said.
This is not the first time that a team of professionals seeks to change the approach. In 2013, researchers from the University of Navarra, Spain, conducted a study with 6,000 people and concluded that up to 29% of people who are lean according to their BMI would actually be obese if their fat amount was taken care of. In addition, they estimated that 80% of people who according to their BMI belong to the category of "overweight" would in fact be obese.
The debate is open, it is only a matter of time to know if the WHO guarantees a change in the form of measurement.