Obesity is increasing in Latin America

The prospects for 2020 point to six of the most obese countries in the world are in Latin America: Venezuela, Guatemala, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Of these, Venezuela is the third-most obese people in the world, with 41.6%, and Mexico will be in tenth place, with 35.3%. In this regard, Chile is the country with more overweight people in the region and the second in the world. Obesity rates have increased considerably since 1980, when it began to spread fast food consumption in Latin America. Increased access to food with high levels of saturated fats and increasing urbanization means more sedentary lifestyles most widely used parameter to measure overweight and obesity is the body mass index (BMI). In this sense, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines overweight as a BMI equal to or greater than 25 and obesity as a BMI equal to or greater than 30 reference thresholds used for individual assessment. WHO has estimated that, given current trends, by 2015, approximately 2300 million adults are overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.