Move aside, America! You are no longer the most obese populous nation in the world.
According to a United Nations report, Mexico has now taken on the title of chubbiest country in the world, unseating its neighbor to the north. The report found that 70 percent of Mexican adults, with nearly half of them considered to be obese.
Things aren’t much better among kids, either. The Medical Daily reports that childhood obesity in the country has tripled within the past decade and one-third of Mexican teenagers are obese.
None of this is cause for celebration, however, as Mexico only leads America in overall adult obesity rates by one percent – 32.8 percent to 31.8 percent.
Beyond that, Mexico’s expanding waistlines really serve to show the country’s poor state of affairs, as 50 percent of the country remains below the poverty line. The Medical Daily also reports that healthy diets are becoming increasingly hard to come by, prompting individuals with low incomes to substitute costlier, healthy food with cheaper, unhealthy fare like fried foods and soda.
“The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese,” physician Albelardo Avila with Mexico’s National Nutrition Institute told CBS News. “In the poor classes we have obese parents and malnourished children. The worst thing is the children are becoming programmed for obesity. It’s a very serious epidemic.”
According to The Daily Caller, the country also faces a serious issue with diabetes, which claims the lives of about 70,000 Mexicans a year — a number that’s roughly equal to the number of Mexicans who have been killed due to gang-related violence over a six-year period.
