By Mira Cheng, CNN

ATLANTA — More than 1 billion children, adolescents and adults live with obesity around the world, making it the most common form of malnutrition in many countries, according to an analysis published Thursday in the journal The Lancet.

This staggering statistic was driven in large part by the rapid transition of malnutrition in the form of underweight to obesity in low-income and middle-income countries, Dr. Majid Ezzati, senior author of the analysis and professor at Imperial College London, said in a news conference Thursday.

Previous estimates by the World Obesity Federation suggested that there would be 1 billion people living with obesity by 2030, but that number was already surpassed in 2022, Ezzati said.

"We've really been taken aback by how fast things have happened," he said.

The new global analysis, conducted by more than 1,500 researchers from the Non-Communicable Diseases Risk Factor Collaboration and the World Health Organization, analyzed the height and weight measurements of over 220 million people from more than 190 countries.

The analysis focused on rates of underweight and obesity, both forms of malnutrition that are detrimental to people's health. Adults were classified as obese if their body mass index was greater than or equal to 30 and classified as underweight if their BMI was below 18.5. Children and adolescents were defined as obese or underweight based on age and sex criteria by age, according to the study.

"Undernutrition and obesity are two faces of the same problem, which is the lack of access to a healthy diet," Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the WHO Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, said in the news conference.

The analysis estimates that nearly 880 million adults and 159 million children lived with obesity in 2022. Obesity rates among children and adolescents worldwide increased fourfold from 1990 to 2022, while obesity rates among adults more than doubled.

"It is very concerning that the epidemic of obesity that was evident among adults in much of the world in 1990 is now mirrored in school-aged children and adolescents," Ezzati said in a news release.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50935482/more-than-1-billion-people-in-the-world-now-live-with-obesity-analysis-finds