• Posted March 4, 2025

Obesity On The Rise Worldwide, Report Says

More than half of adults and a third of children and teens worldwide will be overweight or obese by 2050, a comprehensive global analysis has concluded.

Overweight and obesity rates in adults, children and teens more than doubled over the past three decades, afflicting 2.1 billion adults and 493 million young people with excess weight, researchers reported in The Lancet.

And unless something changes, about 60% of adults (3.8 billion) and a third of children and teens (746 million) will be overweight or obese by 2050, researchers project.

“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” lead author Emmanuela Gakidou said in a news release. She's a professor of health metrics sciences with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Among high-income countries, America had the highest rates of obesity, results show. About 42% of men and 46% of women in the U.S. were obese in 2021.

More than half of adults with excess weight now live in just eight countries, researchers found: China (402 million), India (180 million), the United States (172 million), Brazil (88 million), Russia (71 million), Mexico (58 million), Indonesia (52 million) and Egypt (41 million).

The largest number of adults with overweight and obesity in 2050 are expected to be in China (627 million), India (450 million) and the U.S. (214 million), researchers said. 

But during that period, overweight and obesity in sub-Saharan Africa is forecast to increase by more than 250% to 522 million, driven by population growth.

“Governments and the public health community can use our country-specific estimates on the stage, timing, and speed of current and forecasted transitions in weight to identify priority populations experiencing the greatest burdens of obesity who require immediate intervention and treatment, and those that remain predominantly overweight and should be primarily targeted with prevention strategies,” Gakidou said.

For the study, researchers tracked BMI rates in 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2021 to capture current trends, then then used those trends to project obesity rates out to 2050. (BMI stands for Body Mass Index, an estimate of body fat based on height and weight.)

Overweight people have a BMI between 25 and 30, while obesity is defined as a BMI of 30 or over, researchers said.

A projected rise in obesity among people 65 or older is expected to strain health-care systems as excess weight drives more chronic disease among these seniors, researchers said.

Overweight and obesity also increased substantially among young people. The rate doubled in both children 5-14 (from 9% to 18%) and teens and young adults 15-24 (10% to 20%), results show.

Obesity rates tripled from 2% to nearly 7% among young people, researchers found.

Globally, the predicted surge in obesity among children and teens is expected to outpace the increase in overweight, with substantial increases expected within this decade alone, researchers projected.

Boys are expected to fare worse. Among those between 5 and 14 years of age, levels of obesity are expected to outpace those of overweight 17% to 13% by 2050, researchers said.

“But if we act now, preventing a complete transition to global obesity for children and adolescents is still possible,” co-lead researcher Dr. Jessica Kerr from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia said in a news release.

“Our estimates identify children and adolescents in much of Europe and south Asia living with overweight who should be targeted with obesity prevention strategies,” Kerr said. “We have also identified large populations, particularly adolescent girls, in North America, Australasia, Oceania, north Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America that are expected to tip over to obesity predominance and require urgent, multifaceted intervention and treatment.”

This, she concluded, “is essential to avoid intergenerational transmission of obesity and to prevent a wave of serious health conditions and dire financial and societal costs for future generations.”

The findings were published March 3.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on how excess weight affects a person’s health.

SOURCE: The Lancet, news release, March 3, 2025