NICE Newsroom

The study, published on Thursday in The Lancet, reveals the dramatic rise of obesity rates nationwide since 1990, when just over 50% of adults were overweight or obese, and shows how more people are becoming overweight or obese at younger ages than in the past.

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The chart above shows the obesity prevalence % for different age ranges. The chart is close to the peak at 44+% for the 60 to 64-year-olds and drops consistently to just over 20% at 80.  

The paper defined "overweight" adults as those with a body mass index at or over 25, and "obese" adults as those with a B.M.I. at or over 30. The authors acknowledged that B.M.I. is an imperfect measure, but from a scientific perspective, experts said, B.M.I. is correlated with other measures of body fat and is a practical tool for studying it at a population level.