Hannah Ritchie

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61 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Hannah Ritchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Food Programme · The Weight of the World · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

So if we go back to kind of 1980, obesity was already a problem in today's rich countries.

So they already had relatively high rates of people being overweight or obese.

I think what's really changed over the last 30 years or so has been this shift to not just being a rich country problem, to being a truly global problem.

So you've actually seen quite rapid rises in obesity levels in low and middle income countries, which you hadn't seen previously.

Just to give a bit of context there, so in 1980, around one in five adults were overweight.

Today, that's closing in on half globally.

And obesity rates, which is a higher threshold than just being overweight, in 1980 it was around 1 in 20, and it's closing in on 1 in 5 now.

I think what's quite stunning to me is actually some of the rapid rises in particular countries, as I said, middle income countries, where you've seen this rapid rise actually very, very quickly.

So to take one example of Pakistan, just in the last 20 years, the share of adults that are overweight has more than doubled and the share that are obese has more than tripled.

And that's within just two decades.

Obesity is not a cause of death.

it is a risk factor for premature death.

And by that we mean that someone is obese generally has an increased risk of diseases such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, a range of different cancers.

It basically increases the risk of having those diseases.

So no one will have obesity on their death certificate.

in the same way that no one will have smoking on their death certificate, but we know that smoking increases someone's risk of developing lung cancer, for example.

So the lung cancer would be on the death certificate, but not smoking.

And it's the same for obesity.

So there is this metric that tries to capture how many people or what share of people die earlier than they otherwise would have

because they're overweight or they're struggling with obesity.

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