By Dawne Bennett
Caribbean Net News Barbados Correspondent
Email: dawne@caribbeannetnews.com
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados: Barbados has been rated as having the 12th fattest population in the world. That's according to a Forbes report, which indicates that Barbados also has the second greatest percentage of overweight people in the Caribbean.
It says that 69.7 percent of the adult population of Barbados is classified as overweight, based on the most recent estimates by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Dominica, the highest rated Caribbean country, comes in at number 11, with 71 percent.
The South Pacific island of Nauru tops the list of 194 countries, with 94.5 percent of its population overweight. The Federated States of Micronesia, Cook Islands, Niue and Tonga round out the top five, all with a portly population of over 90 percent. Eritrea is at the bottom with 4.4 percent.
The US weighs in at number nine , with 74.1 percent considered overweight.
The WHO says there are currently 1.6 billion overweight adults in the world and it has projected that number to grow by 40 percent over the next 10 years.
The WHO's definitions of "overweight" and "obese" are based on an individual's body mass index (BMI), which measures weight relative to height. Overweight is marked by a BMI greater than or equal to 25 and obese is defined as having a BMI greater than or equal to 30.
Experts are blaming urbanisation and the influx of Western ways of life including myriad fast food choices, little exercise and stressful jobs for the obesity crisis.
"Due to urbanisation, more people are living in more dense environments, in cities where they are removed from traditional food sources and dependent on an industrial food supply," says Director of policy and public affairs for the International Association for the Study of Obesity, Neville Rigby.
"Modernisation is causing countries with small populations and few resources to depend on imported, often over-processed food. The Western diet overwhelms, and many people are not genetically engineered to cope with this," he says.
Daniel Epstein of the WHO Regional Office of the Americas says obesity has become a problem of poverty: "Poor people have an easier time of eating junk food. People fill up on things that have a high caloric value but little nutritional value." |
