Russians outweigh most Europeans in obesity rankings

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Alina Lobzina – Dec. 11, 2012)

Obesity has become a problem for over 25 percent of Russia’s population, head of the Nutrition Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday.

After an annual examination of 1,500 people across the country, dieticians found that 55 percent of Russians had problems with excessive weight, Viktor Tutelyan told journalists.

For Europe the highest obesity rate was slightly above that, with Hungary weighing in with 28.5 percent in the east and Britain becoming the fattest nation in the western part of the continent, a recent study carried out across 27 nations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed.

Myth busters

In their conclusions, Russian diet specialists cast doubt on age-old myths on the appearances of the county’s female population, raising questions about their health issues.

“Our women are way ahead of most European countries in obesity prevalence,” Alexander Baturin, deputy director at the Nutrition Institute, told RIA Novosti.

In general, women more often suffer from obesity than men, and it’s only Norway, Iceland and Malta where this trend has been proven wrong, according to the OECD.

The problem, however, goes further and affects younger citizens. In Russia, 19.9 percent of all boys and girls are overweight, and 5.7 percent suffer from obesity, Igor Kon, head of child nutrition at the Institute said citing the data collected in 2010-2011.

“If we compare that with other countries, fortunately, we are not ahead of the globe,” Kon said. “But by itself, this figure is quite worrying,” RIA Novosti quoted him as saying.