The World Health Organization (WHO) sites the following facts related to overweight and obesity:
- Globally, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, at least 300 million of them obese.
- Obesity and overweight pose a major risk for chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer.
- The key causes are increased consumption of energy-dense foods high in saturated fats and sugars, and reduced physical activity.
According to the WHO:
- currently more than 1 billion adults are overweight – and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese.
- Childhood obesity is already epidemic in some areas and on the rise in others. An estimated 22 million children under five are estimated to be overweight worldwide.
- according to the US Surgeon General, in the USA the number of overweight children has doubled and the number of overweight adolescents has trebled since 1980.
- the prevalence of obese children aged 6-to-11 years has more than doubled since the 1960s.
- obesity prevalence in youths aged 12-17 has increased dramatically from 5% to 13% in boys and from 5% to 9% in girls between 1966-70 and 1988-91 in the USA.
- obesity accounts for 2-6% of total health care costs in several developed countries; some estimates put the figure as high as 7%.
- the true costs are undoubtedly much greater as not all obesity-related conditions are included in the calculations.
The rapid rise in overweight and obesity in the Unites States is graphically and emphatically depicted in a series of slides at http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/trend/maps/index.htm
The WHO clearly states that to cure the obesity epidemic and associated chronic diseases we must reduce consumption of saturated fats in favor of unsaturated fats.
This means a switch away from highly saturated shortenings commonly used by the food industry and a switch to next generation shortenings such those described in a previous post and the low saturated fat shortening alternative technology available from Coasun Inc. www.coasun.com SB.
