A woman frowning at her bathroom scale in St. Louis, a man whose pants are suddenly too tight in Jakarta, and a roly-poly child playing under a tree in Cairo all are part of a 1.1 billion-person trend called “globesity.”

From Samoa to Kuwait, from Jamaica to Britain, in Latin America and even in countries where people die of malnutrition, the planet’s citizens are gaining weight and slowing down. 

Worldwide, 750 million adults are overweight and 300 million more are obese.

This simultaneous global ballooning makes it clear that powerful societal changes are the main cause, according to Neville Rigby, public affairs director of the London-based International Obesity Task Force.

“Many people are taken in by the idea that you only have to make a choice to be healthy,” Rigby says. “But the environment they live in provides a constant stimulus to consume more.”

Americans are not the heaviest people in the world. For example, 34 percent of American women are obese, nearly identical to the rate in Bahrain, Paraguay and Malta, according to IOTF estimates. But Pacific Islanders have the world’s highest obesity rate — 75 percent among Samoan women.

What alarms IOTF and the World Health Organization is that three in five people in the world are not active enough to benefit their health. While planners in the United States envy European cities as models of active, pedestrian-friendly environments, some already walkable world cities have discovered the only way to pry people out of their cars is not with friendliness, but with force.

In February, London officials began charging $8 per car to drive into the central city. The impetus was to ease congestion and reduce pollution, but the effect was exactly what active-living proponents hope for — more pedestrians, new bicyclists and more people using public transport. Trondheim, Norway, and Singapore have similar strict rules, and Edinburgh, Scotland, has similar plans.

This year, the World Health Organization is pursuing grander and more aggressive goals than any imagined by American planners. Convinced that nagging individuals to eat less and move more won’t work, it aims:
— To stop the worldwide trend toward cheap, mass-produced processed foods.
— To encourage the food industry to voluntarily alter advertising, pricing, labeling and marketing of junk food on a global scale.
— To get people moving any way possible.

Driving the more urgent moves is the growing number of obese, unfit children. In the United States, 15 percent of elementary school children are overweight. But in countries like Egypt and Mexico, 25 percent are. Worldwide, one in five children weighs too much.

“When do we as a society have to acknowledge responsibility for what is happening to them?” Rigby asks.

The other worrisome milestone: For the first time in history, the numbers of overweight people and underfed people in the world are equal. As is true in the United States, the poor are most at risk of obesity in developing and wealthy countries worldwide.

With nations now tied together by trade, pop culture, business and technology, and fast food, lifestyles in every country are looking more and more similar. But it is likely not just fast food and soda that are making the world fat. It is the spread of Western-style impatience.

“Americans say, enjoy today, don’t wait for tomorrow. We want to eat now, we want the free refill of lemonade, we want to earn income now, we don’t care how stressful our life is, or if we won’t save, or if we die young,” says health economist John Komlos, professor at the University of Munich in Germany. “They say, ‘What do I care what happens 30 years from now?’”

Economists have a term for this phenomenon: low-time rate preference. Or put more simply, the measure of a society’s unwillingness to give up a benefit today in exchange for one tomorrow. Many economists have noted a parallel between savings rates — a marker of a low-time rate preference — and good health, including normal weight.

His idea may be off the radar of American planners and the World Health Organization, but Komlos thinks the most important thing policy makers could do is teach children around the world to develop patience.

“It’s one way to counter the ice cream makers and beer salesmen,” he says. “One could imagine advertisements that said, ‘Tomorrow counts. You have to think of tomorrow.”’
———
For a chart comparing obesity rates in various countries, visit http://www.iotf.org/media/globalprev.htm.
———
Ellen Creager is a health and fitness writer for the Detroit Free Press.
———

(c) 2003, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

 

Read more on this topic

> America’s new diet: Less sprawl, less fat, less frenzy.

> Seven plans to get America moving