With obesity rate growing rapidly in the whole world, take a look at the most obese countries in Europe. Obesity is becoming one of the most serious health problems around the globe.
Obesity rate is calculated by the value body mass index (BMI). A person is considered to be obese when their BMI exceeds 30. But what BMI actually represents? BMI is a measure that indirectly represents the amount of body fat related to height. BMI value is calculated by dividing body mass by square of body height. This means that BMI grows directly proportionally to weight and inversely proportional to height. This might seem to be generalizing body mass, since taller people might get unrealistically higher BMI values compared to their body measures. Another disadvantage of this value (when talking about global statistics) is that it does not take into account factors like sex, age and muscle mass which impact a lot on actual fat quantity in the body.
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Nevertheless, BMI is used as standardized value for determining crude weight status for both sexes for age above 20. According to BMI, four categories were made that represent weight status of a person. Those categories are: underweight (BMI ˂ 18.5), normal weight ( BMI 18.5-24.9), overweight (25.0-29.9) and obese (BMI ≥ 30, as we have noted earlier). BMI values for children and adolescents under 18 years of age are calculated in bit different manner.
Deadliest and unhealthiest factors that increase premature mortality in Europe are alcohol and tobacco consumption and obesity. Ireland is on a good way to becoming one of the most obese countries in Europe as well as the UK, both of these countries projected to have over 37% of the population obesity by 2025. The obesity rate is growing rapidly in many countries, but there are those who actually care about this issue, whom you can see in 11 Thinnest Skinniest Fittest Countries in the World.
Most of the statistics were done for the European Union, so some of the information come from Euronews, Eurostat. Since those statistics are for the countries that are members of European Union, and as we all know Europe has more countries than that, we tried to search individually and compare the results. An interesting statistics of the most obese countries in Europe is graphically shown nicely on maps from Jakub Marian’s Language learning, science & art.
All of that information is nicely put and graphically represented, but certainly the World Health Organization gives the most detailed and most reliable statistics on many health related issues. Because of that, we took their information as the most reliable one. For this research we have used data from Global Status Report on noncommunicable diseases for 2014.
As noted earlier, there are many parameters on how obesity is represented: by age (children, adolescents, adults) or by sex. We have here concentrated on adult obesity percentage of both sexes for age above 20. So, statistics for the most obese adult populations of Europe are:
