Russia reports growing obesity problem

The proportion of the population has risen by 10% in five years, the health minister has said

The number of Russians diagnosed with obesity has grown 10% over the past five years and now amounts to almost 2.5 million people, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko told an international medical forum this week. The number of people requiring medical monitoring due to their weight issues has grown almost a quarter over the same period, he added.

One in four people in Russia faces health risks due to an unhealthy diet; one in five is overweight and one in ten is obese, the minister said, citing annual screening data and occupational health assessments.

”The number of [obesity] diagnoses in the Russian Federation … amounts to 2.4 million,” Murashko told the International Congress on Obesity and Metabolic Disorders, which was held in Moscow this week. “The number of people suffering from obesity and requiring regular medical checkups … accounts for 1.2 million.”

Only about 35.7% of Russians have a desirable body weight, said Ivan Deev, the head of the health ministry’s monitoring, analysis and strategic development department. Obesity-related health issues cost Russia 4% of its GDP each year, the official said. Given that the national GDP amounted to 172 trillion rubles ($1.79 trillion) in 2023 according to Rosstat, this means the country is paying approximately $72 billion to address these problems.

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Russian health authorities are currently working on new approaches to monitoring obesity risk factors, Murashko said, without providing any further details on the issue. The congress he addressed started on October 10 and will finish up on October 12 and is expected to be attended by over 1,500 medical specialists from Russia and abroad.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990 and adolescent obesity has grown four-fold over the same period. In 2022, one in eight people in the world were obese. As many as 43% of people aged 18 or older were overweight, the UN health watchdog said.

More than two in five adults in America are obese, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Some 9% of the adult US population were severely obese between 2017 and 2020, according to the agency’s data. “This means that more than 100 million adults have obesity, and more than 22 million adults have severe obesity,” the CDC said.

The EU statistics agency Eurostat reports that “weight problems and obesity are increasing at a rapid rate in most” of the bloc’s member states. Almost 53% of the adult population in the EU were overweight as of 2019, it said, naming Croatia, the Czech Republic and Hungary as the nations facing the most serious obesity-related issues, with Finland, Poland and Romania as well as the Baltic States following closely.