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Chapel Hill/Sao Paulo (pte020/09.03.2005/11:00) - More women around the world are overweight than underfed, even in poor countries and rural areas, a report has found. As The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au reports, the study found that 32 per cent of urban women in 36 countries were overweight compared to 9 per cent of rural women who were underweight. "The prevalence of overweight among young women in the developing world has reached an alarming state," wrote the US and Brazilian researchers in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Michelle Mendoz and Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina http://www.unc.edu and Carlos Monteiro of Sao Paulo University http://www.usp.br collected data on body mass index, a measurement of height versus weight, from nearly 150,000 women aged 20 to 49 in the three dozen countries. A BMI of 18.5 or lower was taken as underweight, according to international standards, while a BMI of 25 or above was overweight. The researchers found that consistently, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, many more women, urban and rural, were overweight than underweight. Among more than 3,300 women in Kenya, 28 per cent of urban women and 15 per cent of rural women were overweight, while 7 per cent of urban women and 12 per cent of rural women were underweight.
"The exception was India, where very high prevalences of under-nutrition persist (23.1 per cent of urban and 48.2 per cent of rural women)," the researchers wrote. "Whereas overweight in urban areas has been widely acknowledged, this data indicates that the burden in rural areas is also substantial. Half of the countries surveyed had a 20 per cent prevalence of overweight in their rural areas."
In the developed word, many more women are overweight. In the United States, more than 60 per cent of women are overweight and 33 per cent are obese, and thus at serious risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and some cancers. "The results of this study suggest that, in the absence of policies to shift current trends, continued economic development and urbanisation in developing countries will likely be accompanied by increased prevalences of overweight in both rural and urban settings," Mendoz's team concluded.
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