"On anybody's plate, rice takes up between 50-70 percent of the space." "The diet is largely rice-based," he said. People in the region also struggle to maintain a balanced diet, said Dharmapuri, with meals often lacking vegetables. This new lifestyle has caused a rise in the consumption of convenience and processed foods, which often contain excess fats and more salt and sugar, researchers said.
In addition to consuming more, as economies have grown, people in Asia-Pacific have moved away from farming into manufacturing, and then to service sector jobs - which are more sedentary, researchers said.Ĭities in Asia-Pacific have also seen unprecedented growth over the last two decades this year more than half the region's population will for the first time be urban, the United Nations has estimated.Ĭity-dwellers in Asia-Pacific can spend hours commuting - due to poor transport systems and infrastructure - and when they finally reach home they have little time to cook. The "obesity time bomb" will be discussed by the 46 member governments attending the FAO conference for Asia and the Pacific, which starts in Fiji from Monday.
"For the last 20 years the economic growth has been almost uninterrupted," said Helble, who has researched obesity levels in the region for three years. "The region has undergone economic growth, so food has become available at a relatively cheaper price," said Matthias Helble, an economist at the ADBI in Tokyo. Rising wealth levels over the last 20 years have played a major role in the rise in obesity levels, researchers say. The cost to the Asia-Pacific region of citizens being overweight or obese is $166 billion a year, a recent report by the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) said. Many of these nations are also struggling to tackle malnutrition among their citizens.
Australia also has high rates of obesity. Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand are among the most overweight countries in Southeast Asia, while Samoa, Tonga and Nauru are the most overweight in the Pacific. "While the United States leads the way on obesity rates, the number of overweight children in Asia-Pacific is rising rapidly, and many countries in this region are now among the most health-threatened in the world."Īdult obesity rates are highest in the United States, Mexico, New Zealand and Hungary, and lowest in Japan and South Korea, according to a report on member states by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.īut the rapid rise in obesity among young people in Asia-Pacific is worrying because overweight children are at higher risk of becoming obese as adults and then developing serious health problems like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and liver disease. "The rate of growth in obesity in Asia-Pacific is higher than in many other countries," Dharmapuri told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The number of overweight children under five rose 38 percent between 20 in the region, and the problem is growing, said Sridhar Dharmapuri, a food safety and nutrition officer at the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Bangkok. Obesity rates among children in Asia-Pacific are rising at a rapid rate, and more action is needed to encourage healthier lifestyles and ease pressure on fledgling healthcare systems, researchers said.
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