Key facts

• Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.
• In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.
• 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.
• Most of the world's population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
• 41 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2016.
• Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight or obese in 2016.
• Obesity is preventable.

Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health.Body mass index (BMI) is a simple index of weight-for-height that is commonly used to classify overweight and obesity in adults. It is defined as a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of his height in meters (kg/m²).

Facts about overweight and obesity

• Some recent WHO global estimates follow.
• In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years and older were overweight. Of these over 650 million adults were obese.
• In 2016, 39% of adults aged 18 years and over (39% of men and 40% of women) were overweight.
• Overall, about 13% of the world’s adult population (11% of men and 15% of women) were obese in 2016.
• The worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016.

A high-fat diet changes fungi in the gut and may play a role in the development of obesity, according to a new study in mSphere, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. While gut microbes have previously been implicated in the development of obesity, this study shows that fungi may also play a role.

In the new study, mice fed a high-fat diet had significantly different abundances of 19 bacterial and 6 fungal taxa than mice fed a standard diet, with a high-fat diet causing a similar magnitude of change in overall fungal and bacterial microbiome structures. Predicted microbiome functional modules related to metabolism were significantly less abundant in high-fat diets. The researchers also identified correlations of coabundance between specific fungi and bacteria in mice that are fed a normal diet and found that the number of these coabundance correlations decreased in the mice that were fed high-fat diets. The results of the study support the inclusion of fungal community analyses in studies that seek to discover new connections between intestinal microbiomes and metabolic health. 

Source: American Society for Microbiology, naturalnews.com, WHO