One in three may be obese by 2012
Thu Dec 11, 2008 5:20am GMTLONDON (Reuters) – A third of all British adults — some 13 million people — will be obese by 2012 if current trends continue, jeopardising their health and straining healthcare budgets, researchers said on Thursday.
Over-eating and lack of exercise mean more and more Britons are seriously overweight, with 32.1 percent of men and 33.1 percent of women now expected to be clinically obese in four years’ time.
Almost half of them will be from low income and disadvantaged communities, widening the health gap between the haves and have-nots, according to Paola Zaninotto of University College London and colleagues.
Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers are all directly linked to obesity, and the condition causes at least 9,000 premature deaths each year in England alone, the research team said.
It also costs the economy around 7.4 billion pounds a year, they reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Their forecasts of future rates of obesity are based on data collected each year from 128,000 adults that provides a nationwide sample of Body Mass Index readings, which relate height to weight.
Previous research has shown a rapid rise in British obesity levels, with its prevalence almost doubling in men from 13.6 to 24 percent between 1993 and 2004 and rising nearly 50 percent among women, from 16.9 to 24.4 percent.
Obesity is a mounting concern for healthcare officials worldwide.
Drug companies have tried for years to develop a successful anti-obesity pill but the field is littered with failures, with Sanofi-Aventis’s Acomplia — withdrawn in October over links to mental disorders — the most recent casualty.
