Obesity and Cardiovascular Risk Factors

Excess bodyweight is an important risk factor for mortality and morbidity from cardiovascular diseases (CVD), causing early 3 million deaths every year worldwide. Many studies have shown that adiposity, as measured by body mass index [BMI], has increased in recent decades in many populations (Figure 1). Obesity and overweight have reached epidemic proportions and it could reverse life-expectancy gains in high-income nations [14]. Finucane et al. [5] estimated 1980-2008 trends in mean BMI for 199 countries and they found that mean BMI for men and women increased 0.4 kg/m2 and 0.5 kg/m2per decade respectively [5]. The study showed that in high-income countries, male BMI rose most in the USA (1.1 kg/m2 per decade), followed by the UK (1.0 kg/m2 per decade), and Australia (0.9 kg/m2 per decade), and least in, Switzerland, Italy, and France, with increases ranging 0.3-0.4 kg/m2 per decade.