Something amazing happens in global nutrition: As of 2025, children around the world are now more likely to be obese than underweight.
according to UNICEF’s new children’s nutrition reportabout 9.4% of school-age children (5-19 years old) suffer from obesity, while weight is less than 9.2%. 25 years ago, the gap was even bigger: Nearly 13% of children were underweight, while only 3% of children suffered from obesity. Over time, these lines merge and flip.
It can be strange to have buckets with the same obesity as underweight in the same bucket. One person has long been seen as a problem of scarcity and the other is an issue of excessiveness. But public health experts now define both as forms of malnutrition, which describe in three ways: insufficient food, too much wrong food, and hidden hunger for micronutrient deficiency.
There is a silver lining of hope for this crossover: it is more dangerous than a child who is more dangerous than two decades ago. This decline is indeed important, as underweight can mean high dysplasia, impaired brain development, weak immunity, and at worst, a higher risk of death. So the fact that these numbers are falling is a real progress.
But the rapid surge in obesity is overshadowed by 188 million children now get along with it – although it appears the largest, it changes a lot with the region.
Obesity in children is more than just size; it increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and even some cancers. Being so young is more expensive. By 2035, overweight and obese Expected The global spends more than $4 trillion per year – accounting for about 3% of global GDP.
UNICEF is based on the crossover of the survey data to 2022 forecasts in 2025, and this trend is obvious despite some uncertainty brought about by the precise year. And it still points upwards; the report predicts that childhood obesity rates will continue to rise to 2030, especially in Latin America, the Middle East and East Asia.
This shift is consistent with changes in the food environment that children raise today. Supermarkets, schools and corner shops are piled with foods with high calories, added sugar, saturated fat and salt. Think soda, packaged snacks, instant noodles – this product is designed to be cheap, convenient and irresistible. That’s the design.
“Food companies are not social services or public health agencies; they are businesses that shareholders can please,” Marion Nestle, a food politics scientist at NYU, said via email. “Their job is to sell more products…regardless of the health impact.” Unlike a generation, these foods are no longer limited to wealthy countries. Now, they are widely used in LMICs and are increasingly replacing traditional diets.
Super processed foods (bug words swept the healthy circles) tend to cover such foods. rare Randomized trial The National Institutes of Health (National Institutes of Health) found that people who eat more than 500 calories per day eat 500 calories more than the minimum amount of diet they processed. most Research Shows an association between hypersevere food intake and obesity or poor health, although they cannot prove their causality.
But experts also debate what a super process is. The United Nations and many researchers use systems to determine which superprocesses qualify as being too wide and sometimes combine together foods. That’s why critics like Nicola’s guess explain The category “Useless Boundary” points out that it can combine things like Oreos, tofu and homemade soup made with Bouillon Cube.
Nevertheless, the debate about definitions has not eliminated the broader findings: These calorie-intensive, large quantities of products sold on the market have always been associated with poor health. “It’s as close to your causality [in public health]Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a professor of public health nutrition at Yale University, said.
Another change in the past 25 years is that children today are far less active than the generation. exist Global Survey ReportMore than 80% of adolescents fail to make the World Health Organization recommend daily exercise hours, a sedentary shift that makes the impact of diet worse.
The result is a world where no area is not touched, but the pictures look very different depending on your location. Rich countries like the United States (21%), Chile (27%) and the UAE (21%) report extremely high childhood obesity rates. In some parts of the Pacific Islands, more than one-third of children are obese, which is a trend that is increasing reliance on imported processed foods compared to traditional diets.
But this is not universal. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, underweight remains more common.
This regional situation shows that we are in a fragment of progress and crisis. Some areas are still fighting too little food, while others are too much, and many will face it at once.
The driving force of this flip is structural – pricing, marketing, food availability – which is where the solution is.
“Latin American countries are worried that obesity and the chronic diseases that come with it will bankrupt their health systems,” Nestlé said. This concern has prompted governments to move faster than most people. Chile’s 2016 warning label law and advertising packaging cut Buying sugary drinks and snacks, Mexico bans junk food in public schools this year, reshaping the choice of 34 million children. “Impact studies show that they work to a large extent,” Nestlé added. Soft drinks in the UK are heading in the same direction. promote Beverage companies with less sugar.
In the United States, by contrast, there is little speech in the exercise that makes the United States healthy again. “The Maha Movement is all about. … Policy Document Come out a few days ago Essentially we have no regulations or policies, we just develop research and voluntary guidelines. Jess Craig previously reported on Voxthe Food and Drug Administration proposed packaging labels are far from the bold stop warning in Latin America, a measure that experts say actually changes behavior.
Of course, no law will reverse the obesity curve, and almost every country is working to address it. But measures such as warning labels, soda taxes and marketing restrictions should at least outline the look of a serious policy toolkit.
The decline in underweight is worth celebrating. But the rise of obesity has now surpassed it, and it has reshaped the meaning of malnutrition in the 21st century. Calories alone are no longer the main problem. This is the calories children consume. Now, we have solved an old crisis in a world, just stumbled upon another crisis created by the food system.
