These Countries Now Have More Obese People Than Hungry People

24/7 Wall St. Insights

Innovations in free trade have allowed U.S. food exports to prolierate around the world.
While cheap food is helping reduce world hunger, it is also causing obesity to skyrocket.
In the last 20 years, the share of obese residents surpassed the share of underweight residents in 43 countries.
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Over the last 40 years, improvements in industrial scale farming, innovations in the global supply chain, and the establishment of free trade organizations like NAFTA and the WTO have enabled U.S. Big Ag companies to export the Western diet to the rest of the world. American agricultural exports have more than tripled since the turn of the century, from $55.0 billion in 2000 to $188.9 billion in 2023. While rising food export activity has allowed cheap food to proliferate around the world, it has also resulted in widespread negative health effects. Diabetes is on the rise in the developed world, and obesity is on the rise globally.

In some countries, public health concerns over diet have shifted from underabundance to overabundance. In a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, researchers harmonized BMI data across 3,663 different studies to develop historical estimates of underweight and obesity prevalence in 200 countries. The resulting data reveals 43 countries where the prevalence of obesity has surpassed the prevalence of underweight or thinness since 1990.

While most of the populations where obesity has surpassed underweight or thinness are in developing nations in Asia and Africa, some countries stand out from the cluster. In South Korea, for example, as the percentage of adults with underweight BMI fell from 5.1% in 1990 to 5.0% in 2022, the percentage of adults with obese BMI rose from 1.5% to 7.2%. Similar swings occurred in upper middle income countries outside of Asia and Africa like Guyana and Cuba. But the largest swing occurred in Pakistan, where the percentage of adults with underweight BMI fell from 27.4% to 6.7% as the percentage of adults with obese BMI rose from 3.2% to 23.7%. Explore the gallery to see the full list of countries.

To determine the countries that now have more obese people than hungry people, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data on historical BMI estimates from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration. Countries were ranked based on the magnitude of change from adult underweight prevalence to adult obesity prevalence, measured as the sum of the absolute value of the change in adult underweight prevalence from 1990 to 2022 and the change in adult obesity prevalence from 1990 to 2022.

BMI estimates were averaged across male and female populations. Only countries where adult obesity prevalence surpassed adult underweight prevalence were considered. Underweight prevalence is the percentage of adults with body mass index below 18.5 kilograms per meters of height squared, while obesity prevalence is the percentage of adults with body mass index greater than or equal to 30 kilograms per meters of height squared. Supplemental data on population is from the World Bank.