Globesity: Fat’s New Frontier reveals an unprecedented global obesity outbreak in a country where not long ago famine was the number one health problem. In China, the use of sugar and oil led to rapidly expanding waistlines; in Brazil, global food companies fundamentally changed the usual daily food intake and expanded nationwide.
In India, where 100 million people are expected to suffer from diabetes in the near future, in Mexico, the world’s largest consumer of carbonated drinks, diabetes has made headlines and weight problems so serious that special programs are in place and free Fitness classes and bariatric surgery. If you thought obesity was only a problem in first world economies like the US, UK and Australia, then this documentary will blow your mind.
The bounty of the world is changing in ways that will surprise you and possibly even disturb you. Recently, hunger has been the number one health problem in many impoverished parts of the world. An estimated 700 million people are underweight and 100 million are overweight (mainly in rich countries). How the situation has changed.
In fact, no country has ever succeeded in eradicating hunger without rapidly becoming obese. Among the poor and developing countries, from sub-Saharan Africa to South Africa, from the Middle East to Asia and Latin America, no country has solved this conundrum.
By 2010, the number of underweight people had increased only slightly, but the number of obese people had risen to 500 million. It is estimated that by 2030, more than 1 billion people will be obese. Just when the numbers started stabilizing, we shifted the obesity problem to the developing world. This is a global problem and every country on the planet should be concerned about it.
