Читать книгу Clinical Obesity in Adults and Children - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Data from the United States suggests that mean population BMI was increasing consistently across the decades from the early 1900s, but the level of overweight and obesity, as defined by a BMI of 25 and 30, only began to increase rapidly in the early 1980s [11]. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on obesity showed that in the 1970s the overall US adult obesity prevalence was already 14% for all adults, but it has risen progressively since then and continued to increase in the 2010s to above 35%. Similar patterns were seen in other developed countries. National surveys of English adults in the 1930s and 1940s reported obesity rates less than 5% in those below the age of 40 years but increasing to 10% in the 50‐year‐old men. Detailed national representative surveys in England in 1981 showed that overall obesity rates remained relatively low (6% in men aged 16–65 years and 8% in women) [12], but obesity rates had already risen to 11–12% in 40–60‐year‐olds. Similar prevalences were found in studies in Finland (albeit those data were self‐reported), and the Netherlands also reported an average adult prevalence of 5%, but measured prevalence data from Japan on average showed that only 2% adults with obesity.

From the early 1980s, it is clear that obesity prevalences were starting to increase in all Western societies, and by the late 1980s, upper‐middle‐income countries were beginning to follow the North American and European countries, with increasing obesity rates evident in both men and women from the age of 20 upwards. The pivotal importance of this early part of the 1980s in setting new trends of increasing obesity was vividly illustrated by Norton and others’ analysis of children’s weights and heights measured in community and other population surveys in Australia over a whole century [13]. By using the IOTF’s BMI criteria for childhood obesity [14] (which linked seamlessly with the adult BMI cut‐off points), Norton’s analysis showed that there was very little increase in childhood obesity until the early 1980s when a remarkable increase started to develop. These IOTF cut‐offs have subsequently been refined [15], but the overall picture and analyses are unchanged and reveal something very unusual changed in the environment from the early 1980s onward in affluent societies, with middle‐income countries revealing the beginning of a rise in BMIs a little later.