Seventy-four per cent of men and 64 per cent of women in Britain will be overweight or obese by 2030, or so the newspapers have reported today. In Ireland, the situation will be still worse, with the obesity rate amongst women predicted to rise from 23 per cent today to 57 per cent (!) in 2030, with 89 per cent of Irish men overweight.
The research in question was presented at a conference in Prague today but remains unpublished so we do not know how its authors arrived at these figures. A representative of the World Health Organisation says, ‘the data needs to be taken with extreme caution’, but this advice has not been taken by the writers of such headlines as ‘Almost everyone in Ireland will be overweight by 2030‘.
Before we get too carried away by the hoo-hah, it’s worth reflecting on the track record of obesity predictions – a record which is, to put it mildly, sub-optimal.
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