Obesity is increasing more in rural than in urban areas worldwide

A study, led by Imperial College London, in which the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP) participated, shows that obesity is increasing more in rural than in urban areas. The research, published in Nature, reveals that weight gain in rural areas is the main driving factor in the obesity epidemic worldwide.

The study analyzed information on the weight and height of 112 million people in 200 countries between 1985 and 2017, and showed that since 1985, the average Body Mass Index (BMI) in rural areas has increased by 2.1 kg/m² in men and women. In cities, the increase was 1.3 kg/m² among women and 1.6 kg/m² in men.

According to Majid Ezzati, from Imperial’s School of Public Health, who is one of the researchers involved in the study, “these results stress that we need to rethink how we deal with this global health problem”.

Although the study does not analyze the determinants of the overall increase in obesity in rural areas, Elisabete Ramos, one of the ISPUP researchers involved in the article, says that this could be explained by the fact that “heavy agricultural work is increasingly mechanized and that food intake is becoming more similar to urban patterns“.

According to the researcher, “the great value of this work is to offer a comprehensive picture of the evolution of BMI over three decades and to show how the evolution was different in different regions. Although we see an overall trend, the increase in weight in rural areas was more meaningful in low income countries. This is because in high-income countries – where Portugal is integrated – the differences between rural and urban areas as early as the 1980s (the initial period of the study) were smaller than in low-income countries”.

Although global data show a greater role of rural areas in increasing BMI in high-income countries, more than 75% of the increase in BMI between 1985 and 2017 is explained by the increase in urban areas.

These results reinforce the role of the environment in the evolution of this epidemic and the need for public policies that promote healthier contexts in both rural and urban settings.

The study entitled Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults is authored by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which involves scientists from all over the world, and of which ISPUP is part of.

Image: Pixabay/Yuri_B