Obesity is now a critical global issue. More than 2.1 billion people – nearly 30% of the global population – are overweight or obese today (Ng et al. 2014). That’s nearly two and a half times the number of adults and children who are undernourished. Obesity is responsible for about 5% of deaths worldwide. Simon Stevens, chief executive of the National Health Service England, warned in September that “we are sleepwalking into the worst public health emergency for at least three decades.”1
This crisis is not just a pressing social and health issue, but an economic one, too. The global economic impact from obesity is roughly $2.0 trillion, or 2.8% of global GDP – roughly equivalent to the global impact from smoking or armed violence, war, and terrorism, according to new research by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI 2014) (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Obesity is one of the top three social burdens generated by human beings