Former WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said, the main reasons for the rise of abdominal obesity in India are unhealthy diet and physical inactivity. Swaminathan, who is currently the Principal Advisor to the Health Ministry’s Tuberculosis Programme, called for increasing access to healthy diets and exercise venues in the country to fight obesity, which is already a global health concern. Obesity is a known precursor to diabetes, hypertension and cancer – non-communicable diseases on the rise in India and around the world.
“Abdominal obesity – unhealthy diets and physical inactivity are driving this unhealthy trend,” Swaminathan said in a post on X. Published in The Lancet Regional Health Journal on abdominal obesity. The study led by researchers from IIHMR University in Jaipur and Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in the US is based on data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) conducted in 2019-21.
The results showed that abdominal obesity was more prevalent in women (40 percent) than men (12 percent). About 5-6 out of 10 women between the ages of 30 and 49 suffer from abdominal obesity. In women, the association with abdominal obesity is stronger in older women and non-vegetarians. While abdominal obesity is more prevalent among people living in urban areas, studies have shown that it is also increasing in rural areas and penetrating the lower and middle socioeconomic classes of the society.
In India, BMI has traditionally been used to measure obesity. For the first time, NFHS-5 assessed abdominal obesity through waist circumference of 6,59,156 women and 85,976 men (aged between 15 and 49 years). Thus, the study found that some women with a healthy BMI also have abdominal obesity. Higher prevalence of abdominal obesity was seen in Kerala (65.4 percent), Tamil Nadu (57.9 percent), Punjab (62.5 percent), and Delhi (59 percent), while Jharkhand (23.9 percent) and Madhya Pradesh (24.9 percent) The circulation was less.
Apart from indicating “emerging health risks for Indian women”, the study also showed a “double burden of malnutrition” in the country. The researchers urged the government to “take proactive steps to design targeted interventions for groups who have a higher incidence of abdominal obesity, particularly women in their thirties and forties”.
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