Almost a third of the world population is now overweight or obese – about 2 billion people worldwide. No country has been able to curb obesity rates in the last three decades, according to a new global analysis released in May, led by Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. He and colleagues reviewed more than 1,700 studies covering 188 countries from 1980 to 2013.

“Our children are getting fatter,” Dr. Margaret Chan, the World Health Organization’s director-general, said bluntly during a speech at the agency’s annual meeting in Geneva. “Parts of the world are quite literally eating themselves to death.”

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